I enjoy Simon Carr in the Independent on Sunday review every week as I enjoy his sketch every weekday during parliament. The her outdoors/him indoors feature was moved to the end of the section during the Sindy‘s redesign a few weeks ago and sits better there I think. It has taken the place of the lost world of Michael Bywater, which is now the opener for the review and much better placed for it.
Anyway, from him indoors:
We are intensely self-aware, are we not? We have seen ourselves at odd angles, reflected in windows, and in the looks of those who love us most (that can be the cruellest view). We know what we are. What could there be that could change our whole sense of what this could be?
In the same week’s review, Michael Bywater is also on good form:
What we need is the Pink Pound, rolled out nationwide. What we’ve actually got is the Dog Dollar. The place is full of them, howling and barking and fighting and slashing in doorways and carking up bucketloads of cut-price laaaaaaaaaaager and snout kebabs and crisps, porn cocktail flavour and cheese-‘n’-arse flavour and roast-feet flavour…except that, unlike dogs, this lot have guts: not beer guts but stupidity guts that flobble as they strut, pork-belly lips flapping as they squirt out long, honking phonemes from no known language, roaring about laaaaaaaaaaaaaager and foopbaaaaaaaw and yow phaaaaaaaaaaaakn kaaaaaaaaaaaant OI’M PHAAAAAAAAKN WAIAIAIAIAISTID, wuuuuuuuur…
And the women. Dogs. Dog dogs. Even to dogs they’d be dogs, blurping pallifly out their chain-store slag-wrappings, mottled thighs, wind-whipped, lurching bandily on their crappy heels, slappers, worse than slappers, no fun at all, just pouches of loosel assembled protoplasm with only an extra ragged X-chromosone to show for their sojourn to Earth, for all those millions of years of evolution; only the accidents and outpouchings of their genetic heritage to trade with.
arbitrary constant 