Perfect at least as animals

In the early afternoon I went into Easterby with Andrew and Jay and we showed Jay the sights of the city. He was quite amusing and insisted on taking film with his home-movie camera of Andrew and I walking down Hutton Steps.

We had a curry at the Bahawal; the streets alive with students laughing and talking, wandering to and fro and posing. At three-thirty, after a drink at The Four Pigeons, I said goodbye and met Lee at the library. We bought our bus tickets for Sunday and, after seizing upon a copy of Kollaps by Einstürzende Neubauten, I came home. I rang Penny to tell her to remind Shelley not to bother getting me the LP.

Lee came round in the evening, supposedly to dye trousers black, but we spent the time playing darts in my bedroom. We’ve dreamed up a scheme to shower the Saturday-nite Jasper’s mating crowd with balloons filled with pig’s blood. Our vantage point will be opposite the club on the William Street multi-storey car park: visions of the white-clad dance floor shufflers spattered with the black, congealed blood proved too much for Lee, and he was full of noisy enthusiasm for the idea. “I’ll have to do it now,” he said laughing.

We even thought of sending pretentious letters to the Echo in support, signed “The New Puritans.” The only thing putting us off is the lack of a fail-safe escape route. It would be horrendous if it went wrong; we’d end up getting beaten into the ground or arrested—probably both.

“If only we had become perfect at least as animals! But to animals belongs innocence” . . .