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The inspector shook his head in despair, but he had reckoned without the long-engrained ruthlessness of the middle class towards its own children. As I knew full well, any social group that would exile its offspring to the deforming rigours of boarding school life would think nothing of exposing them bto the haxards of an exploding bonfire.

No middle-class revolutionary can defend the barricades eithout a shower and a large cappuccino. You might as well fight them in yesterday's underwear.

Our marriage belonged to an adventure playground where real danger and real possibility never existed.

If I were to walk out of her life she would miss me intensely, for ten minutes. Then the next lodger would arrive and join the game of snakes and ladders that led to her bedroom.

'Decent & level-headed people are hungry for violence...the ideal act of violence isn't directed at anything.'
'pure nihilism?'
'the exact opposite...it isn't a search for nothingness. It's a search for meaning. Blow up the Stock Exchange & you're rejecting global capitalism. Bomb the Ministry of Defence & you're protesting against war...but a truely pointless act of violence...grips our attention for months.

Art exhibitions at the Tate Modern:

"This was the art show as Führer spectacle, an early sign, perhaps, that the educated middle classes were turning towards fascism."

The Thames shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea and was ready to make a run for it. Below Westminster the Thames became a bruiser of a river, like the people of the estuary, unimpressed by the money terracesof the City of London.

Like so many waiters I had known, he was friendly but slightly aggressive

'tell me, how do you explain all this to your bishop?'
'I don't. A parish priest has a lot of discretion.'

The revolution had been rescheduled to a more convenient day. the middle class rebels valued their leisure, and the assult on the barricades would be squeezed between concert and theatre visits and the pleasures of fresh seafood.

'People like going to airports.' the woman gazed at the sky... 'they like ge long term car parks, the check-ins, the duty frees, showing their passports. They can pretend they are someone else.'
' you don't think it's a kind of brainwashing?'
'I want to be brainwashed.' the woman turned away as the sound of barking came from the pool. 'must go. They're trying to drown the dog...'

Her flat was sparsely furnished, with armless black chairs, a glass-topped writing desk that resembled an autopsy table, and low-wattage lamps that barely lit the gloom. This was a nightclub at noon. There were no books, and I sensed that this hard-minded young woman came here to erase the world.

This is a fun book of eros and thantos

However it is s library book and there are lots of short slightly curly hairs between the pages. Either the previous reader had short hair and was constantly scratching their head, or they are long sighted (perhaps +2.5 or +3) and read the book naked propped in their lap beneath their groin... Both quite Ballardian possibilities.

It was some years before I noticed that the other boys at school enjoyed a social phenomenon known as fathers.

The work here us more important. We have to set prople free from all this culture and education. Richard says they're just ways of trapping the muddle class and making them docile.
So it's a war of liberation?

I guessed that for years she had been detaching herself from the real world, and in her mind rode a ghost train through a fairground she had built herself.

...the suntans hide who they really are - salary slaves, with heads full of American rubbish. Travel is the last fantasy the 20th century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.
And that can't be done?
There's nowhere to go. The planet is full. You might as well stay at home and spend the money on chocolate fudge.

America invented the movies so it would never need to grow up. We have angst, depression and middle-aged regret. They have Hollywood.

I don't remember Ballard as being so jokey, maybe I was much serious when I read his earlier novels, maybe he was more serious when he wrote them, I like how this line echos Harry Lime's self justifying speech in "the third man" which Greene pointedly did not include in the book.

You look awful - what happened to you?
I bruised a rib, I explained. Someone kicked me.
At Olympia? A police boot, I bet.
Cat lovers. They're very violent.
...
Believe me, nothing brings out violence like a peaceful demonstration

Before sentence I explained that I was searching for the murderers of my first wife, at which point the chief magistrate closed his eyes.
'at a cat show?'

He had shaved off his now thabeard, clearing away the past now that he faced a future eithout Laura. He had grown the beard after the dtart of their affair, and I always suspected that this was an ill omen.

-The famous beard of ill omen

All these trips? Let's face it, they're just a delusion. Air travel, the whole Heathrow thing, it's a collective flight from reality. People ealk up to the check-ins and for once in their lives they know where they're going. Poor sods, it's printed on their tickets.

Travelling abroad was an effort for her - the knee-jarring geometry of taxid and bathrooms, and the American psychologists who daw a glamorous woman dwaying on her sticks as a special kind of erotic challenge.

Were squatters moving into Chelsea Marina, giving up their soft drugs & hard mattresses? Were they ready to try a new lifestyle, to face the problems of school fees & Brazilian daily helps, ballet classes & BUPA subscriptions?

Jérôme Fourquet "l'archipel français" - idea that there are few common reference point, therefore one cannot speak of a french society. Strikes me as an interesting idea, but hardly one that is unique to France. Maybe the issue is the assumption under the idea, of Eugene Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, that a nation should have a unifing ideas and a single common culture?

Beaucaire geeft me het gevoel dat ik hier niet met de trein ben gekommen, maar met een tijdmachine.

-shush, don't let SNCF hear that, they will charge extra!

Arles. She describes that a railway repair centre, paper manufacturing, rice processing and metal industry have all left the town since the 1980s leading to a push to tourism (and rising house prices). However she quites Roth who visted in the 1930s before those industries arrived and the town was decrepit and poor. Is deindustrialisation then the problem? Or rather unsustainable development?

Nîmes - bullfighting as regional identity in opposition to national uniformity.

I thought this was a bit ofd because the old Roman arena they use for the fights was only cleared out in the 19th century and indeed bullfight spanish style was introduced into France during the 2nd empire when Napoleon III married Princess Eugenie of Spain.

The saga of Maurice the cockerel, here as epitomising the divide between new and long term rural residents.

In 1956 it was forbidden to sell alcohol to children under 14 in school canteens any more, older children however could continue to have a glass of wine with their lunch until 1981.

I wonder if that made for more or less peaceful afternoons for the teachers?