Kicker conspiracy

Pete, Mo and I went for a lunchtime drink at The Jervis Arms, our old rambling local, and afterwards we went into Watermouth. I bought The Fall’s “Kicker Conspiracy” (I still say they should split up), and we had some tea in a tiny café near Attlee Square before Mo went off to try to find a flat. Pete and I remained there feeling very conspicuous; sometimes the conversation around us dropped, and it seemed as if all eyes were upon us.

We met Shelley outside, who’d just come back from a Siouxsie and The Banshees concert in London. Her latest craze is to regard herself as some sort of outrageous punk, which is utter crap. Pete was in one of his ‘wacky’ moods and so I left him to go over to Lee’s on the train.

Lee seemed pleased to see me; he said he’d been pissed off that I hadn’t gone over yesterday like I said I might. He’s still keeping his distance so far as making friends with the other people in his residence hall is concerned. In the kitchen he treats them disdainfully and with a kind of arrogance, setting out to be as deliberately irritating and annoying as possible: “I suppose it’s stupid really. I should try to make friends with the people I’m living with.”

Instead he stays holed up in his breeze-block, white-washed cell, watching his portable TV and talking to himself, and when he does venture out into the kitchen he kills the crane-flies which continually flutter in through the open window by squirting washing-up liquid at them and thereby annoying everyone else. Says he, laughing; “they daredn’t shout at me as it’s only the first week.”

We didn’t do much, just messed about really. I let Lee cut my hair, which was a mistake as it’s now painfully short.