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“... sun, like the ... fuck it: who cares? Cut In a break for ads I glimpsed the bar where I used to be young. A Thirties detective was quizzing a local in clouds of tobacco: flocks of pewter flew up the wall, a horse-brass winked, and there on my tongue was your darkest secret like Old Virginia. What became of the boy who arrived on the dot of visiting hour and ...”

“... had Kingsley Amis and Ian Hamilton, imbibing and describing for all they were worth, you now have young men who constantly pat their pockets, plead poverty, dodge their round and worry about their deadlines, in ways that would have made Dylan Thomas reach for some ancient bardic curse. This all started many years ago when a ...”

“... in agreement. They are talking about a group of travelling vandals, said to reside in Dursley. Two young trees have been broken on the Innocks Estate in North Nibley; tiles were ripped from the bus shelter, and Councillor Ray Manning – hero of the moment – has removed a broken seat. I pick up a copy of the Gazette later on, and see there is more. A £300 ...”

“... Southern Germany, Bavaria, Cornwall, and in Urbino (where presumably he first came upon traces of Andrew Marbot’s life); now he seems to have settled in Poschiavo in the Swiss Grisons. Rumour has it that he is a generous host with a fair Knowledge of the local vineyards. Travel, especially of the involuntary sort, does not always broaden the mind, and it ...”

“... If​ you are British and no longer young, the title for a brand new Philip Larkin poem is liable to enter your head at least once a day. This morning it was ‘Order of Service’. It’s not as good as ‘High Windows’ or ‘Dockery and Son’, but it has the same doleful ebb. Searching in an old folder, I found an order of service for Larkin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 February 1986 ...”

“... insisted on keeping it in the purse with her pin number.She believed, with justification, that young people use material things to fool themselves into thinking they’re living their best life. (‘You can’t take it with you!’ was one of her favourite phrases.) If you’re eighteen now, obsolescence just tells you how much you’ve grown. Nobody with ...”

“... but for those who care, the shows are like visitations. Last week there was a perfectly tonsured young man in full Berber costume outside the old sorting office in New Oxford Street. He lives in Cockfosters and maintains a blog on male trends. ‘If fashion isn’t everybody’s life then I don’t know who everybody is,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s not the ...”

“... so vivid as to make other decades struggle to make themselves noticed beside it. People who were young in the 1960s speak a lot about the period, its ‘values’, its new freedoms. I have a friend who says the 1960s was like ‘someone turning the lights on’. Jenny Diski, a stalwart of this parish, has written, in her excellent book The Sixties, as good ...”

“... YouTube, you could say, is the depot for international self-realisation. Danny MacAskill, a young guy in Edinburgh who can do brilliant tricks on his mountain bike, gets himself filmed and somebody sticks it up on YouTube. Three million views. The young guy’s a legend. Andy McKee, a man who picks and slaps his ...”

“... of Jesus Christ. ‘Only Jesus Christ can convince alcoholics and homosexuals to change,’ one young man said. He was wearing combat trousers and a white hoodie bearing the words ‘Jesus Walks with Me’. The man in the hoodie might have referred to Psalm 62, where men, when weighed in the scales, are lighter than air, yet the virus appeared to have ...”

“... Jerry says, as Joe drags him out the door. More recently, in Entourage, the HBO series about a young movie star and his gang, we see how the agent-as-harbinger-of-comic-confusion has become, in the modern era, the agent-as-conductor-of-cosmic-chaos. In Series Two, our young actor, a Hispanic on the brink of ...”

“... the heads of people passing.’ At Birzeit University – sign on the gate, ‘No Guns’ – the young women studying English wanted to talk about Foucault and George Eliot. Near the place where Yasir Arafat is buried, graffiti on the wall says, ‘ctrl+alt+delete’, the command you key in when your computer freezes. And that is the feeling one gets in ...”

“... to be ironed out by the ‘journey’. In the first episode, we see Kardashian talking to his shy young children at the breakfast table, the same children who would not go on to enjoy world-famous careers as Trappist monks. ‘Fame is fleeting,’ he tells them, with a straight face, looking at Kim. ‘It’s hollow. It means nothing at all without a virtuous ...”

“... had come to address his college’s literary society. When Amis eventually asked for questions, a young woman said something that came as a surprise. ‘Can you give us your “Sex Life in Ancient Rome” face?’ she asked. (Jim Dixon, the hero of Lucky Jim, is keen on making faces, and is stumped at the end of the book because he is more or less happy, and ...”

“... Cheats: Ending on a High’, which might, inadvertently, appeal to the culinary instincts of those young rebels currently snapping up The Cannabis Cookbook by Tim Pilcher (Pocket Books, £9.99), ‘recipes so delicious, nothing will ever get wasted – except your dinner guests’. ‘They’ve outlawed the number one vegetable on the planet,’ Timothy Leary ...”