Starter For Ten by Nicholls David

Author:Nicholls, David [Nicholls, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult, Contemporary, Adult, Humor
ISBN: 9780345498120
Publisher: Villard
Published: 2003-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Round Three

'I'm sorry,' said Sebastian, after a time. 'I'm afraid I wasn't very nice this afternoon. Brideshead often has that effect on me.'

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

QUESTION: Striated, cardiac and smooth are three types of which tissue?

ANSWER: Muscle.

Some New Year's Resolutions

1 Spend more time working on my poetry. If I'm serious about poetry as a literary form, as well as a way of earning extra money, then I'm really going to have to work at it, especially if I'm to discover my own distinctive voice. Remember, T.S.Eliot held down a job in a bank and wrote The Four Quartets, so not having enough time is no excuse.

2 Stop picking at my face, especially when I'm talking to people. If science has taught us anything, it's that picking at your skin just spreads the infection and causes scars. Just leave it alone, find something else to do with your hands, learn to smoke or something. Remember - no one wants to kiss a bleeding face.

3 Be aloof. Play it cool with Alice - she'll respect you more for it.

4 Become lightly muscled.

The above were written at about 10.45 p.m. on New Year's Eve, and I was pretty drunk by then, which means that the handwriting's a bit slurred. Twenty minutes later I was asleep, thereby flouting the conventional, cliched notion that says we're obliged to have an amazing, fun time on New Year's Eve, by having an unconventional, unbelievably shitty time.

Festivities began at 8.35, when I found a screwdriver in the kitchen drawer, and unscrewed the doors of Josh's wardrobe so that I could get to his portable television. I then sat and watched the James Bond film on ITV, joining the massed ranks of elderly windows, mental patients and everyone else who stays in on New Year's Eve. But the more I drank, the more I thought about Dad, and Alice, and the two got strangely muddled in my head so that by the time Agent 007 had foiled Scaramanga's evil plan for world domination I was pretty much a physical and emotional wreck, thereby becoming the only person in the history of the world ever to cry watching The Man With The Golden Gun with the possible exception of Britt Eckland. Then I pulled myself together, and wrote the resolutions.

And now, two weeks later, the resolutions still stand. True, I haven't really grappled with my poetry yet, but will soon, when I get time. And I've barely touched my face. I've also been very aloof with Alice too, largely because I haven't seen her or heard from her and have no idea where she is. In fact, socially, things have been a bit quiet since term began again. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles' cousin warns him that your second term at university is generally spent avoiding all the undesirable people that you met in the first term, and I'm starting to suspect that I am, in actual fact, one of those people.

But back to the resolutions. The last one needs some elucidation.

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