Let’s crack on with more books before I start ranting on about the weather again, because MY GOD I could rant for miles. Also I’m supposed to be at Martin Amis’s memorial service and I’m not, for obliquely weather-related reasons too dull to go into, and I’m peeved about it.
Anyway: books. (I remember so vividly when Money came out. I was in my first term at university and had just been to pick up my giant reading list, basically anybody French alive in the 19th and early 20th century who’d ever set pen to paper, plus Dante etc, and there was the shiny hardback of Money, so I bought it too. This boy came to visit me - I’d only been there about 2 days, hats off to my 17 year old self - and he came to my room when I wasn’t there and left me a note next to Money saying ‘I’m glad to see you’re reading a proper book’.
And that has just reminded me that later that term I was in my friend C’s room and an unwanted boy came to visit her. When he knocked we pretended to be an answering machine. She put on a robotic voice and said ‘I am not in my room, please leave a message after the tone,’ and I said ‘BEEEEEP’ and he, poor thing, cleared his throat and did. We waited for his footsteps to go away and then screamed with laughter to the point of wanting to pee. This callowness making me laugh again as I type).
I mentioned this before, but it’s so good that I’m mentioning it again. This is one of the very best things I’ve read in recent memory. It is utterly brilliant, a word I lazily overuse all the time to mean ‘quite nice', but in this instance the mot juste.