I wasn’t so well this weekend. I fear it may have been prompted by a somewhat indulgent Friday night. But I’m sure one can still have a seasonal cold when the season hasn’t exactly been massively different from the whole rest of the year. Anyway, on Saturday morning, I reached - gingerly - for the only book with the perfect description of how I felt. I cut and paste it here:

“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”

‘Lucky Jim’ is the novelistic (if these is such a word) equivalent of comfort food. And so funny. So clever. And such an accurate portrayal of that most perilous emotion - boredom. My old copy has such a wonderful cover with a typically scratchy and very apt illustration by Quentin Blake, far better that the one on the Amazon link, but I can’t find it anywhere on the whole interweb. There’s lots about the bread-flogging band Lucky Jim though.

Apart from that, it was all about the papers and a mixtape I’m doing, but all should hopefully be revealed on that front soon. Talking of mixtapes, how great is this?

It’s cold in our office today and I’m hungry. So that’s it for now…