F: hey Me: hey man!!!! F: how’s u Me: just chilling, watching Newsnight in my pants lol, u? F: what Me: if I were a woman I would want to look like Emily Maitlis what about you? Me: i already do quite a bit and im a man! Me: hey, remember when Paxo went on a rant about M&S pants a few years back and how they don’t make them supportive enough and he was pissed off because you couldn’t get good pants anymore, what was that all about? Me: he must have quite pendulous balls Me: u horny? Me: hello? .
One day, after my father’s death, I was in my parents’ house looking through his bookshelves. I thought about powdering the books for fingerprints so I’d have something left. I still think about that sometimes. What difference would it make to have a copy of fingerprints made by fingers that no longer exist? Those fingers were burned, and now they are dust.
As we travel through the sky and up towards the intelligence centre my pupil says why do I fly when you touch me, and I think he knows there is no answer to this question, not any answer that can be told to him that he would understand, and so I say nothing in response.
I’ve been thinking a lot about dying recently. Not my own death, you understand, but the idea of dying as a cinematic experience. Like many generation Y-ers, I grew up on a diet of television shows such as Michael Aspel’s poltergeist extravaganza, Strange, But True? and BBC1’s 999 (remember the episode where the kid gets a javelin through the neck?).
She didn’t grow up going to church. Raised in the Caribbean, by parents who went on vacation to the islands to escape “Reagan’s America” and never left, Sasha’s higher power was the sound of waves crashing against the rocks of the cliff that supported her childhood house. It was the feeling of warmth rising in her chest as the sun dried salty water off her skin.
Father When she is born, she is four pounds and see-through, and I am terrified. My wife’s vagina is smeared over 50 towels on the floor, and she is shaking. Across the room, our daughter guppies silently in a Perspex box, purple and writhing like a baby bird. A wall of strangers are wrangling her tiny body into life.
Walter loved football from his very first touch, on that dusty path outside his house, where he played under the shadows of the coconut palms. He was born, rather unusually, with both of his ankles made out of crystal but his mother and father loved him nonetheless.
It wasn’t a Suzuki GSX-R750 – the bike I’d always wanted – that would come later. It was a Suzuki GSX-R600 – near enough, certainly for me, who’d never ridden anything faster than a Lambretta. I’d always had Lambrettas: GPs, Yorkshire style, no Moddy crap – race-tuned, stripped-down, 85 mph – fast for a scooter.
