feeling old

*unsheathes light sabre* Bring it on! I'm ready to do battle with the forces of dark repressive conservatism!

It's at this point that the dark forces of repressive conservatism remember a prior engagement, make their excuses and leave stammering their apologies and pointing at their watch ...

Shouldn't she have been at home revising? Frankly I'm disgusted with her parents.

It was finished by 8.30 so hopefully she rushed straight home to her text books before curfews had to be enacted...

*puts away light sabre* You've escaped me this time...

Was she any good?

A true gentlemen would never answer such a question. And considering she's doing her GCSE's I would hope he didn't find out.

You should worry - my next birthday has an '0' at the end and a '5' at the beginning. I'm still fighting those dark forces though and will continue to do so until the day I die. Forward to the Future. Hi Ho Silver and awaaaay! And that dates me too.

To avoid any entendres, innuendos etc and so on ... Caroline Bird's poetry is very good indeed.

Most of the GCSEs finished last week so she's probably a qualified professional by nowI wonder what she'll get for her english grade!

Ah Tony.. frantic youth is alright for a while but with age comes appreciation, perspective and wisdom (and a free bus pass)... *39 this month*

I like to take comfort that I am around the same age as Philip Marlow was in the Chandler novels. :)

Then again, I don't suppose many people my age would want to be able to quote Paradise Lost. Maybe I am wasting my yoof.

I wouldn't worry, I can quote from ninth century Welsh saga poetry in the original and that's nothing to be proud of. Or at least I think I can. 'Stafell Cynddylan ys tywyll heno and all that kind of stuff.

I don't mind being old, old. Why am I always so..........................Honest.............well most times anyway.

I don't feel old at all; however, that comes at the price of never having grown up.

I'm 28 in a couple of weeks and I can't help feeling that I have wasted the last three years of my life. Youth is indeed wasted on the young!

Ah well, you can always watch those nostalgia programmes like, "I Love Last July" to remind you of how great the old days were!

Oh, I feel much better now! *gets out Paradise Lost* "Know I come no enemy, but to set free from out this dark and dismal house of pain!" True story, folks.

Iceman - I very much hope you're setting up a chess problem, drinking a shot of cheap sour Scotch and wondering about the dame that came to you for help that day and whether she really wants the guy who is blackmailing her husband to be caught. I'm neither, but I think I'd rather be the same age as Marlow than Holden Caulfield.

Should anybody be interested, I've put a review of the Voice Box event up on the stories bit (at least I hope I have). Unfortunately it doesn't mention the poetry much, but then I always have a hard time staying focused on what I'm actually meant to be talking about...

Oh and on the subject of Holden Caulfield and Catcher in the Rye, I take it I'm not the only person to completely love that book at 17 and then read it again a few years later and wonder exactly why. The works of Mr Chandler on the other hand ... well, I'm not chiselled enough yet to be a decent Marlowe but I'm sure my Dick Powell impersonation skills will come in handy one day ...

Andrew: I must say it did add to my enjoyment when I read the Chandler novels that I was the same age as Marlow. (38) when I first read the novels.

I thought I was feeling old but andrew's 5760 so there's hope for us all! I always thought catcher in the rye was about a baseball player sandwitch and Paradise lost was a short story of people looking under the table at a casino but that's 'pair of dice' lost, they're very similar except Jerry Lewis is in the latter.

What was the book in which the denouement took place with the main characters sat around a table? The Ages of Man rings a bell but I am not sure.

Youth isn't wasted on the young. I feel I've already lead a full and productive life, despite my yoof. Not many people my age can quote from Paradise Lost! Bwhahahahahahaha

I bought Paradise Lost this afternoon, and received stange looks from the people in the shop. I sat on the train and read though about half the treatise at the beginning that kept going on about hopw long it took the devil to fall and chaos and hell and stuff like that. So i turned the page and read the Marvel thing, which escaped me, and then ploughed straight into the main poem. I was drunk, I could hardly focus on the page, but I had a feeling that there was something in it all of great importance. Try it sometime, it blows your mind. :)

stange - the look someone gives you when they think you have lost the plot but they dont know for sure

I was about 23 when I first read Catcher in the Rye and I had big arguments with people that he was just a miserable whining git - re-reading it a little later, I did grow to appreciate that this was more or less how I'd felt at 16, just that I needed a bit more distance before I could see it. The real core of the novel for me, is when his kid sister Phoebe challenges him to name something that he actually LIKES and he struggles for ages, before finally saying ducks. That for me, was where the book stopped being just about conveying the character of an unhappy and troubled youth and also realised the limitations of that character, the author being aware of so much more than the character. Plus, I like ducks.

The future belongs to the youth of today, Jon!

Bah! Not if my dark forces of repressive conservatism have anything to do with it ...