Status Updates From The Earth

...his head and he was chewing a cheap, foul-smelling, soggy black cigar. And yet in his bleary handsome eyes you could detect the sense of fun and generosity of heart often met with in dissolute but good-natured rogues.

In he came, a tall, strapping, curly-headed, powerfully built man in the full prime of his forty years; his long, pointed, unkempt beard made him look like Jesus Christ but a Christ on whose face life had left its mark: the face of a drunkard not above raping women and waylaving men. He had spent the morning in Cloyes already drunk; he wore muddy trousers, a stained and filthy smock, a ragged cap pushed back on...