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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Moore
Read between
May 23 - June 15, 2019
the UK’s second-highest chimney,
A sign welcomed us to Leysdown-on-Sea.
had we gone there directly and on purpose, and lived in Bexleyheath.
cow-hurlingly preposterous
course I was going to sit on a window ledge for a week listening to Eurosport’s coverage of the Tour de France
the revolving Mercedes stars of an offshore wind farm,
As any tight-arse of a certain age will confirm, it is possible to harvest a steady profit from such machines with no more than a grasp of the basic laws of gravity, an unusually high boredom threshold and at least one functioning eye.
‘Come to Leysdown if you’re excessively fat and ugly, you will blend in ... It’s the end of the world, nobody finds it by accident and only the demented go there more than once.’
‘Truly a car for the 80s – or any 90-year-olds still up to driving.’
Living with the Maestro meant a permanent oil stain on your driveway, and a mechanical soundtrack that has been memorably compared to ‘a skeleton wanking in a biscuit
‘It wasn’t that unpleasant to drive,’ said Roy Axe, trying to find something nice to say about the car, ‘but things fell off it all the time.’
‘Brummie is so droning and depressing, it makes people sound stupid and lazy, like moaning six-year-olds.’
paterfamilias
A discount store trading under the poorly conceived slogan: £1 and much much more!
doughtiest
Only in the atlas index would you find Great Yarmouth anywhere near Greece.
a spam fritter seemed less like a human-grade victual than a discarded filter from some lard-powered canal dredger.
A pair of crusted oblong pouches, like Brillo pads would look if you used a lot of magnolia emulsion in your cooking.
The waitress placed the bill before me and smiled mildly; I creased my brow. ‘You come to Yarmoat for bee’s knees or holly die?’
augured
leaven
Old Leake, Wrangle, Friskney Tofts: the village names told their own tale of deepening isolation, places where there was nothing to do but watch potatoes grow and take unnecessary risks at unmanned level crossings.
paean
If I’d then motored out through Grimsby with my eyes shut, everyone but my insurance company would have been happy.
drumlins
batholiths,
moraine
the top half of the Humber Bridge showed itself, two massive concrete ladders supporting God’s own clothes line.
and a toll booth constructed entirely from crushed puffin beaks.
a Constable by Rothko.
Timmy Mallett, children’s TV presenter cum living incitement to blunt-force trauma,
carapace
stentorian
concomitant
‘Oilcake
Hull had gone into the economic egg-shop with just the one basket, and tripped up on the way out.
it was all entirely agreeable, as long as you ignored the striding, hair-gelled battalions of self-important young-executive bellends,
Thirty years ago, he’d have got me in trouble with my parents; thirty years hence, with my children. Committing petty acts of vandalism without serious redress must be one of the principal advantages of middle age, and I made a note to do it more often.
beholden to plump and insufferable retirees in stupid caps with anchors on, and the wit of a cardboard dog.
What kind of world is it where pleasure craft can be named Why Knot or Fishful Thinking, without those responsible being stuffed into a sack and battered with shovels?
benighted
nucleosynthesis
miasma
staithes,
The mood of ratcheting panic was fed by the in-car soundtrack, which now married Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’ to Ozzy’s disorientated screaming. It was like karaoke night in Broadmoor.
maw.
avuncular
£24.50,
Currently £25.00 per night!
If you’ve stayed in a Formule 1 more than once, you’re either a French lorry driver or a career skinflint whose grim enslavement to economy has flayed from his soul the last clinging shreds of dignity. I’ve stayed in five.
Blue carpets, red handrails, yellow doors: spartan but aggressively colourful, the mood pitched somewhere between the lower decks of a cross-channel ferry and a prison for Teletubbies.
