Dear Mr _____,
Something simply has to be done! I can’t do this anymore. Every day up at five, out to perform yet more drill. Do you even know where they keep us?! It’s absurd. Since a funding crisis eight months ago shut down our barracks we’ve been living and training in the old Tellytubby’s set – basically, picture an over-manicured golf course lousy with fluffy rabbits who, having become accustomed to the salon cut and blow-dry treatment, secured themselves lifetime free monthly styling at Tony and Guys by blackmailing the BBC with threats to go public on La La’s sexual predilections. Read the rest of this entry »
Dear ______,
As you may recall, I graduated from your department a few years ago, in 2002, with a fairly Viagra-fied first. [There follows a fair amount of bumph; if you’re pressed for time, jump forward to the asterisk below. If, however, you’re curious and/or amused by the lives of former students, read on.] Since then I’ve done various jobs, from slumming it doing Mcjobs such as working in ________ Hardware stores both in ________ on the edge of the Black Country and in Scab City, and for the last twenty months teaching English in Prague. (It may well have been living in ______ with Politics graduate ______ ______, who’s become a copper, which led me to emigrate: there I was myself suspected by the local community, or “massive”, to be some kind of undercover cop with my uniform being a rather guileless ruse; I would generally leave the house to chants of “CID” from the local school kids, and, since I worked in the warehouse, occasional observations from the drug-dealing neighbours such as “I ‘int f‘kin s’in ya there!” addressed incredulously spliff –in-hand at my red polyester top; this I could take, it was more ___ and her lesbian twin’s ability to descend daily and at length into some demonic unintelligible sub-estuary argot when having their frequent tiffs that probably did me in. Curiously, fate has now led the woman to find a boyfriend from _______. Bless.) All this while I have also been writing fiction and the like: even if I were not committed to this course long before I even returned to formal education at Kidderminster college (where I bagged the prestigious Victoria Carpets prize!) Scab City seems to be one of these places which polarises people utterly to become either gregegious financially ambitious atavistic yuppies and the kind of people I’ve always labelled as ‘scabs’ who live to embellish their CVs and read nothing after university but Who Moved My Cheese? and What Colour is My Parachute? (the vast majority) or creative types/manques and the kind of generation Xers who intellectually retch at any mention of the concept of a career, let alone one in Goldmann Sachs and assiduously replace all forms of conventional ambition in their minds with lifestyle ambitions such as living in a narrowboat named Ignatious J Reilly or getting arrested for spraying graffiti.
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