Post Midnight Coital Music

Well folks here i am in Seaford and time for some musical diversions -

And here is one track that i would love to play to Bryony -

Cigarettes After Sex - Sesame Syrup

( More music here )

Oh yeah, for all you sexy lovers and romantics.Enjoy!

Good Night

Good Morning

Just Wondering

Did you ever want to be a ballet dancer when you were little?

What was your favourite game to play outside when you were a kid?

Did you live for Saturday morning cartoons when you were younger? How about the Sunday comics?

Book 44 - Jean Rhys "Smile Please"

Jean Rhys "Smile Please" (Penguin Modern Classics)



There is something sadly fitting about Smile Please ’s being an unfinished autobiography. According to her publisher Diana Athill in the volume's foreword, Rhys was reluctant to revisit in an autobiography painful aspects of her past that she had already treated in her novels. At the same time, Rhys was frustrated by her readers' tendency to assume all scenes and characters in her novels were drawn directly from her own life.

This explanation of Rhys’s decision to reverse herself and begin work on her autobiography seems logical, but too pat. I suspect, although I could be wrong, that Rhys, at the end of her life, felt the need to reach back into the past and try to touch her former self, a lonely girl, and later woman, who always felt isolated and apart. Smile Please is a touching and heartbreaking representation of the deep loneliness and alienation at the core of Rhys’s identity. At the same time, there is a clear sense of Rhys’s strength, talent, and beauty emerging from these pages.


The scattered feeling at the heart of Smile Please comes not only from the book’s format, but also from Rhys’s style of approaching her life obliquely. From her very first paragraphs, as she describes a photograph of herself as a young child, she depicts the past as ephemeral, and herself in the past as irretrievably isolated from herself in her present.


Throughout, Rhys continues to explore this strong sense of isolation and loss. She describes her inability to bridge the gap of race and status separating her from her family’s servants in the West Indies, a sense of separation that extended to her awareness of an unbridgeable chasm between herself and the West Indians living around her, particularly as she remembered an interaction between herself and an older black girl at her convent school, whom she was admiring and longing to befriend.

Rhys does not reflect much on the politics of race relations in the West Indies. She captures her childhood understanding, as if caught in amber, and holds it up for us to examine.


The second section of Smile Please focuses on Rhys’s life in England -- her struggles to feel at home in a cold, foreign England, her aunt’s frustrations over Rhys’s odd ways (for example, her taking hot baths in English boarding houses), Rhys’s attempts to feel a part of life at school in spite of her odd clothes. Her intermittent career as a chorus girl brought home to her the feeling of living precariously, with unpredictable lodging, constant worries over money, and the constant need to be on guard and aware of some men’s sexual predation on chorus girls. Throughout the rest of the book, Rhys continues to refer obliquely and glancingly to important relationships and events in her life. Her connection with lovers and former lovers often is played out via impersonal intermediaries. In some of the most heartbreaking writing in her autobiography, Rhys remembers her struggles to eke out a living for herself and maintain her dignity.


Smile Please is a heartbreaking autobiography, but there is beauty in the facets of Rhys’s story. Her writing is spare, direct, and often lovely. Her unflinching depiction of herself makes me ache for her, but also admire her. Her ability to rise above her pain, to turn it into art, provides us now with a means to connect with her after her death.

Book 45 - Jack Kerouac "The Dharma Bums"

Jack Kerouac "The Dharma Bums" (Penguin Modern Classics)





In "The Dharma Bums", Kerouac has written another great book about the search for truth and meaning throughout the American countryside. The story is narrated by Ray Smith and is effectively Kerouac telling his own story. Smith and his friend Japhy are wanderers (or bums) in search of the True Meaning or Dharma.

The trip covers one year of travels in the life of Smith. His frantic narrative style seems to be fueled by his frequent poorboys of cheap red wine as well as his sheer excitement to be in pursuit of the truth. The story starts in Berkeley, California and visits the Californian desert, Mexico, North Carolina, Seattle and finally ends at Desolation peak in the North Cascades of Washington state. All of these places are reached by hopping on trains, hitchhiking or shelling out a few cents for a bus ride. Interspersed within the descriptions of travel and characters are Zen musings such as "It's all different appearances of the same thing" as well as meditation on different ideals and places.

Kerouac never lets the story slow down and regardless of how accurate the Buddhist ideals are, the rambling, jangly story is quite a ride, so make sure you hang on.

Desperate Moves

Snagged from calico_pye.

Uckfield Visit

It has been a very warm day here.We traveled over to Uckfield today.GC and her two ladies,both named Ann, came as well. They did some charity shop perusing whilst GC did her mystery shops and i did my pub visit.

I booked a table for one ,and after some charity shop perusing myself i arrived half an hour earlier. So i ordered a Tom Paine ale (5.5 % ABV) before choosing what i was going to have from the menu.

I had the salmon fillet served with grilled asparagus, new potatoes and hollandaise sauce.




I recorded a temperature of 29 degrees whilst in the town The high street was abizz of shoppers and sightseers.



We then went over to Heathfield but the hot weather became too much for the ladies so after around three i was back in Seaford and went outside in GC’s garden for some sunbathing.

Book 46 - Georges Simenon"Maigret And The Headless Corpse"

Georges Simenon"Maigret And The Headless Corpse" )Penguin)




This is one of the Maigret novels that demonstrates quite clearly how timeless an author Simenon was.
The discovery of body pieces without a head, thus making identification very difficult, is a scenario explored by a number of crime fiction authors since.

It is a case just made for Maigret who worries tenaciously at identifying the corpse, and once he thinks he has that nailed, takes the focus to who killed him and why.

Another theme that emerges, that we tend to see frequently in more modern novels, is how the case takes over Maigret's thinking, and indeed his whole life. It serves to illustrate what a special person Madame Maigret is, in that this doesn't cause a marriage breakdown, but instead evokes a sort of sympathy from her, as she realises he is even eating without tasting.

THE HEADLESS CORPSE illustrates how, like Sherlock Holmes in many ways, Maigret can assemble minute observations and then make an intuitive leap that generates a bigger question.

Good Night