Three Strikes: Week 33

The heatwave set in last week and continued into this one, baking northern England in particular. The locals walk their pitbulls in the blistering sun. A flat a few doors down blasts Dr. Dre's 2001. The police arrive to make them turn it down.

Saturday morning: I park up near the gym. I've not even got out of my car and I've already been chatted up by a transvestite. Gonna be one of those days, I tell myself.

Saturday evening on the Littlemoor Riviera: A solitary Tarzan call shatters the idyllic urban silence of the street. I look out of my window, and see no-one.

Later, a young couple have a domestic on the street. There's some grabbing, both ways, but nothing overly physical. They leave together out of view.

I spend every free daylight moment I can sat outside, noticing these things, reading. Occasionally I jump rope, in search of the six-pack I once had. The local girls accuse me of showing off.

This week at the gym I tried a second, slimmer type of cross trainer with a slightly less elliptical, circular motion. I struck out training forward- the motion is akin to walking with poles- but training in reverse I managed to get 2 PBs.

I finished Money, by Martin Amis. John Self is a 30-something movie money-man, making deals and spending like the privilaged, streetwise hoodlum that he is. He two-times his girlfriends, visits hookers, buys porn, tries a range of drugs and gradually fucks up his life. He fully accepts that he'll kill himself eventually, but it seems someone is keen to do that favour for him...

An interesting novel. It's gripping and believable, although the narrator is frequently and contradictorily cunning and intelligent and eloquent yet portrayed as a dumb street hooligan in a suit. He's reminiscient, in that way, of Victor Ward in Glamorama and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho- they were both “bimboys”- good looking idiots who happened to be successful, and could show their intelligence when the story required them to. Money and AP both have wealthy, money-driven and slightly soullless narrators. Money, however, was first published in 1984, when yuppie culture was I full flow. AP came out in '91 and Glamorama in '98. The book has that instant freshness of the period, like a first-hand account. It's occasionally over-descriptive, but, hey, it was the eighties.

A good read. By the way, I got my copy signed. Check it out.

Apologies for this pic appearing upside down. This doesn't happen anywhere else on my computer. For fuck's sake.

2 months 'til Ibiza.