Tom > Recent Status Updates

'The New World Order appears to be what Americans too stupid to realise that the Cold War is over, they won, and the world is theirs, have adopted as the new bogey monster now that Ronnie's Evil Empire has a GNP a little less than Disney Corp.'

'I was surrounded mostly by forbidding bright girls from families which seemed to possess infinitely deep reserves of money, taste and talent, and glamorous idiots with braying laughs...'

'Mrs Telman found my mother a job in an office-machine factory in Stepps [...] We ate better, we had proper furniture, a phone and, soon, a colour television. I found I had a lot fewer uncles than I'd thought I had, and Mother stopped walking into doors.'

'I still like the idea of just being a historian.... you know, ideally. But that means staying in academia and I'm not sure that's what I want. Somehow I don't think they let you go straight from graduation into prime-time TV with a twenty-six part dramatised history of the world.' - more's the pity.

'The good lawyer Blawke opined that the will was perfectly legal; under Scottish law, a hand-written will did not have to be witnessed. He even came out and looked at it personally, which made two visits in one week. Truly our cup of honour ranneth over.'

'People dressed in black and looked sombre. They had thin, tight lips, and they sometimes wept, and there was a lot of grim clutching of other people's shoulders, and low mutterings about how so-and-so had been a good person, and that sort of thing. But under it all was a simple joyous fact: they were dead and you weren't yet!'

"Bye-bye, Prentice."
"Try not to fall in love with anybody else before tonight."
"Yo."

'The gear was black and powerful like the night; the hollow aluminium skull of the observatory tracked the 'scope's single eye slowly over the rolling web of stars, or - hand-cranked - swivelled the universe about our one fixed point. Soon my head was spinning, too... and when I started to understand the lyrics of a Cocteau Twins song, I knew I was wrecked.'

'They danced, they kissed, they walked by the quiet harbour where the boats lay still on the water like black oil, and they sauntered hand-in-hand along the esplanade beneath a moon-devoid sky full of bright stars. They each talked about their dreams, and about travelling to far-away places. He asked if she had given any thought to maybe coming back here some time? Like next weekend for example?' Lmao.

'The world and his life were opening up before him and he wanted to take full advantage ... apart from anything else there was always the Bomb, that lurking presence forever threatening to close it all back down again with one final, filthy splash of light that heralded the long darkness, and made a nonsense of any human plan, any dream for the future. Eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow we blow up the world.

"The Wombles, Mr McHoan, of Wimbledon Common, are they real?"

"No Darren they're not real; the real creatures on the real Wimbledon Common are mice and birds and maybe foxes and badgers, and none of them wear clothes and live in nice well-lit burrows with furniture. A lady made up the Wombles and made up stories about them..."

"See, ah told ye" Darren said, shaking his little brother's hand... Dean started to cry.

'The stunning, the fabulous, the golden-haired, vellus-faced, diamond-eyed Verity, upwardly nubile scionette of the house of Urvill, the jewel beside the jowels: the girl who, for me, had put the lectual in intellectual, and phany in epiphany and the libid in libidinous!'

'It was not something I was used to... going from a mild-mannered person to someone who liked to end up looking like a cinnamon roll on the regular. with extra frosting.'

'He apologises for being taller than me, and also for being horny.'

'I can't really say what happens next. In my head that is where the fantasy ends - everything spirals and colours merge like watercolour and it's like I'm falling down the proverbial rabbit hole. Most of my pleasure rests in the before, in the waiting. Most of my deepest desires rest in desire itself.'

''I practice lucid dreaming. Every night I dream I have sex with the actor Pedro Pascal." 'Swiss. Heterosexual. In a Relationship.'

'On flawless tracks, the heavy carriage runs almost without a sound... Rail travel in the Netherlands feels different from that in most other countries because almost nothing of the pre-war infrastructure remains. This makes the past less tangible than it is in England, where everything rattles and looks old.'

'The Jewish wartime death rate in the Netherlands, at 80 per cent, was more than double that of any other Western country, far higher than in France, Belgium, Italy or even Germany or Austria themselves. For me, vaguely brought up on the myth of Dutch resistance, this comes as a shock.'

'They are very happy to 'blackout' their social media for a day, to read all-black books, and 'educate' themselves about black issues - as long as this education does not occur in the form of actual black children attending their actual schools.'

'He was holding up a sign. People hold signs up in the park every day. Sometimes they say FREE HUGS. (Note to pretty Swedish backpackers: they're not free.)'

'Suffering is not relative; it is absolute... it has an absolute relation to the suffering of the individual - it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like 'privilege.' If it could the CEO's daughter would never starve herself, nor the movie idol ever put a bullet in his own brain.'

'Of the 18,000 Jews in The Hague in 1940, 2,000 survived. Of the 400 Portuguese Jews, so deeply embedded in the fabric of the state and the city, just eight returned. The entire Jewish orphanage, which stands across the road from me, was liquidated without survivors on 13 March 1943.'

'The community I discovered is one of love and affirmation; it is part of the old world, but only because the old world was like that. It is threatened by the new world, but only because we are ceasing to live for each other, ceasing to be answerable for our actions, ceasing, in short, to care.'

'The House of Commons was packed for the [Hunting] Bill's second reading, while only eleven members turned up in the afternoon to consider educational provision for the disabled. Hunting is high up the activist agenda: higher than global warming, higher than crime, higher than Rwanda or Saddam Hussein. For this is how the suicide of nations begins, when sentimentality prevails over sense.'

'He lived at a conscious pitch of melodrama; once filling out a form for some job or another he never achieved, he wrote against the space marked INTERESTS, the two words, sex and death.'

'Her brother-in-law gave her a set of pornographic photos... she examined the pictures with a certain impersonal curiosity... a young woman, the principle actress (torso and legs sheathed in black leather, sex exposed) eyed the camera indifferently... so that these stark juxtapositions of genitalia, the antithesis of the erotic, were cold as Russia when nights are coldest there.'

'He liked organising parties for he always hoped something terrible would happen when so many people intersected upon one another. He was, as usual, in a suppressed state of nervous excitement.'

'Existing in a kind of moral and aesthetic limbo... without neighbourliness [in] that world of metalled roads, Astro-turf and 'Executive homes' from the builder's catalogue - New Man will live out his days in tinsel-spattered isolation, knowing the outside world only through the windscreen of his motor car, and adding with each unnecessary journey to the cloud of gas which will one day stifle us all.'

'In the hedge-seamed tapestry of the English pasture, you can read the history of the land and those who have lived in it. This landscape was made for a human use, and without its use it will lose its beauty.'

'Thousand-page accounts of [the lives of] minor politicians are the greatest offence against literature - especially when written by the politicians themselves.'