Search Results

“... AIDS Condoms can never save the world from germs – machines run out of them and chemists close; a friend blames two abortions on the things; some funny little foreign ones don’t fit; besides, they’re not much use for oral sex. Evangelists rejoice God’s got the gays. (He’s let off lesbians though – and wankers too – of course, we all know they go blind ...”

“... The Ecumenical Movement My first years were haunted by foreign names, phrases like ‘apostolical succession’ and strange invasions of dressed-up prelates. After a quick ordination, blessing or what have you in the chapel, they’d go out the back to take their photographs. (I liked the geometry of our garden – first, the square washing-line that wouldn’t spin, then the two apple trees set in the lawn forming a triangle with the pear outside the circle of a fairy ring ...”

“... Next door but one’s being converted into luxury flats. Some weeks back, a dead rat appeared in the road outside. His body seemed to be pointing in the direction of our house. Luckily, he didn’t make it. My home’s a bit like the House of Usher or a brothel for masochists. In the last century, an optimistic Italian shoved two towers on an ordinary Regency building and filled parts with frescoes, decorative plasterwork, Cupids and Carrara marble ...”

“... Early​ this year I had my first and only encounter with Santería. It was at the beach. I had long been an enthusiast for cold water swimming. I liked it even when I lived in Hastings, but it’s slightly easier now that I’m in southern Spain, where I snorkel regularly at my local beach. From mid-May to mid-October the temperatures are fine. For the rest of the year I only do the odd cold plunge into the sea and swim for a few minutes at most ...”

“... Five years ago I applied to the Film Artistes’ Association – the union for extras – in an attempt to find a way of funding my writing. I needed a job that didn’t take all my time and yet paid well. Prostitution had crossed my mind – I expect most women fantasise about that – but the memory of a foreign student and patron of tarts whom I’d once taught brought me back to reality ...”

“... For nearly two years, we have lived in Orihuela Costa, on the Costa Blanca in Spain, among a cocktail of nationalities. Last September, when my son was celebrating his seventh birthday, his Dutch friends brought round a girl from the next road who looked Malaysian. She stayed and had a slice of cake. Her older sisters who came to collect her were introduced as Norwegians ...”

“... Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s favourite novel is a 16th-century Chinese work called Chin P’ing Mei. This book, she believes, was written as an act of vengeance. The author imbued each of the 1600 pages of his manuscript with poison, and presented it to a politician against whom he had a grudge. He knew that the minister, who had a huge appetite for pornography, would lick and turn each page, and so do himself to death ...”

“... her when she goes out on the High in case she might, naively, buy something sexy or deathly by ...”

“... to lead them to bed. ‘I like to think I’m a sort of gay bachelor, Don Juan or Casanova,’ Fiona Pitt-Kethley says at the beginning of her startling account of the sights she saw and the men she laid in the course of two journeys to Italy in search of the lairs of the sibyls and other poets and prophets of the Ancient world. She doesn’t, she ...”

“... punchlines are thrown away without timing or wit. In a comic novel, that’s a serious deficiency. Fiona Pitt-Kethley has written her first novel, so the question of her much-disputed talent can be examined from a fresh angle. The publishers have blazoned their author as ‘Britain’s most controversial poet’, though this accolade does not appear to be ...”

“... are already designed for turning up one’s toes, and at the risk of proclaiming myself as the Fiona Pitt-Kethley of the crematorium, a paid lyricist to fin-de-siècle obsequies, my muse is waiting. I am just about old enough to find myself mourning friends and colleagues younger than myself (a vicissitude endured by my mother, now 92, for a quarter ...”

“... produces tacit conspiracies of specialisation. Thus George Mackay Brown specialises in Feyness, Fiona Pitt-Kethley in Coarseness. Mackay Brown’s The Wreck of the Archangel may charm – Said stone to buttercup, ‘Dance till you’re yellow rags, then die’ – but his legendary Orkney serves only limited purposes beyond its own wistful ...”

“... verse, The Illusionists. One of the book’s best satires is a scabrous fantasy on Wendy Cope and Fiona Pitt-Kethley, who were each launched last year to huge popular acclaim. Pitt-Kethley has been the quicker to consolidate her success, and her new collection, Private Parts, shouldn’t disappoint the large following ...”

“... verse drama is still a lively proposition, in the right hands. There is hardly a single poem in Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s Sky Ray Lolly that could not be improved by judicious rewriting – the adjusting of a line-length here, the straightening-out of a passage of exposition there. Her deadpan manner works most effectively when there is at least the ...”

“... make that much more than a repetition of a tale already told. When it comes to self-revelation, Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s volume makes Madonna’s bared bits and bobs look like a suburban room-setting in House and Garden. It is not, however, quite the triumph of self-knowledge I was after. There’s a certain bravado in publishing a collection of rejected ...”