My hotel room has a trouser press but not an iron. Very English. Does anyone know how to use a trouser press? And why? Pants look ok a bit scruffed-up; shirts don't.
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I went to the football (real football, in Melbourne) last Monday with a mate. I hardly ever drink these days, but I got a bit carried away and before I knew it I'd had two full-strength beers and started to space out a bit. I tried to describe to him later what happened, and the best I could some up with was a 'beer panic', but that doesn't do it justice. If you take Ketamine you can end up in what they call the 'K-hole' and so by analogy this would be the 'B-hole', which does - now that I look at it - sound a bit indelicate.
On the plane (never again a 777!) on the way over I was reading a thing in the New Yorker by Charles D'Ambrosio, and he seemed to catch it, but in a quite different context. He describes having dinner with the parents of friends when he was an adolescent....
"...The easy bantering flow of conversation baffled me. Typically at our house, during dinner, you arranged a syntactically perfect yet cumbersome sentence in your mouth and then gently, slowly, slowly, set it in its proper place... A trowelful of silence worked like mortar; you patted a scoop of it between every sentence to keep the course straight. But with my friend's parents the conversation flowed so fluently I could hardly get my thoughts into it, and when I did they seemed outdated and had this orotund speechy quality that made a stupid thud, exactly as if I'd heaved a brick on the table."
Anyway, I surreptitiously switched to light beer and managed to regain my composure. As you can guess, I'm a very cheap date. Two drinks and I'm anyone's.
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