Strike Up The Band Quotes

One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.

People,” Wax said, “are like cords, Steris. We snake out, striking this way and that, always looking for something new. That’s human nature, to discover what is hidden. There’s so much we can do, so many places we can go.” He shifted in his seat, changing his center of gravity, which caused the sphere to rotate upward on its tether. “But if there aren’t any boundaries,” he said, “we’d get tangled up. Imagine a thousand of these cords, zipping through the room. The law is there to keep us from ruining everyone else’s ability to explore. Without law, there’s no freedom. That’s why I am what I am.

She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring--to strike--when the band behind her fired up the school song: "Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High.

striking, like a model or a member of a boy band. And it all reminds me of that very particular feeling in your tummy. You know. So I am not at all surprised or in the least bit disapproving when the men stand up and the good-looking one then leans over the top of the dividing seats, wondering if he might fetch the girls something from the buffet, ‘. . . seeing as I’m going?’ Next there are name swaps and quite

On vacation you can be anyone you want Like a good book or an incredible outfit, being on vacation transports you into another version of yourself.
In your day-to-day life, maybe you can’t even bob your head to the radio without being embarrassed, but on the right twinkly-light-strung patio, with the right steel drum band, you’ll find yourself whirling and twirling with the best of them. On vacation, your hair changes. The water is different, maybe the shampoo. Maybe you don’t bother to wash your hair at all, or brush it, because the salty ocean water curls it up in a way you love. You think, Maybe I could do this at home too. Maybe I could be this person who doesn’t brush her hair, who doesn’t mind being sweaty or having sand in all her crevices. On vacation, you strike up conversations with strangers, and forget that there are any stakes. If it turns out impossibly awkward, who cares? You’ll never see them again!

I was also one of those people who hadn’t caught up with the latest social networking site. Maura belonged to most of them. She passed most evenings befriending men who had tried to date-rape her in high school, but I was still stuck in the last virtual community, a sad place to be, like Europe, say, during the Black Death. Whenever I cruised this site, with its favorites lists and its paeans to somebody’s cousin’s gas station art gallery, I could not help but think of medieval corpses in the spring-thaw mud, buboes sprouted in every armpit and anus, black bile curling out of frozen mouths. Those of us still cursed with life wandered the blasted dales of this stricken network, wept and moaned and flogged ourselves with frayed AC adaptors, called out for God to strike us dead, or else let us find somebody who liked similar bands.

You should ask him where his crew is.” Doolittle’s face wrinkled in disgust. “Go on. Tell her.” Jim didn’t look like he wanted to tell me anything. “Where is Brenna?” “On the roof, keeping a lookout,” Jim said. “And the rest?” Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen any of them since we came out of Unicorn. “Apparently there is a band of loups near Augusta.” Doolittle leveled an outraged glare at Jim. “I’ve been listening to it on the radio. The city’s on the verge of panic. Odd loups these. Mellow. Although they apparently performed shocking acts of animal mutilation within plain view of the farmhouse, the farmer’s family slept through the whole thing. Curiously, no humans were harmed.” I almost laughed. No loup would attack livestock if human prey was available. They craved human flesh. “They’re creating a diversion,” Jim said. Raphael halted his conversation with Andrea to emit a short, distinctly hyena guff. “That’s the best plan you could come up with?” “Apparently he thinks that Curran’s a moron.” Doolittle shook his head.

Like all Freed musicals and all Astaire musicals, The Band Wagon believes that high and low, art and entertainment, elite and popular aspirations meet in the American musical. The Impressionist originals in Tony’s hotel room, which eventually finance his snappier vision of the show, draw not only a connection to An American in Paris but to painters, like Degas, who found art in entertainers. The ultimate hymn to this belief is the new Dietz and Schwartz song for the film, “That’s Entertainment,” which is to filmusicals what Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business” is to the stage.11 Whether a hot plot teeming with sex, a gay divorcée after her ex, or Oedipus Rex, whether a romantic swain after a queen or “some Shakespearean scene (where a ghost and a prince meet and everything ends in mincemeat),” it’s all one world of American entertainment. “Hip Hooray, the American way.” Dietz’s lyrics echo Mickey’s theorem in Strike Up the Band. What’s American? Exactly this kind of movie musical from Mount Hollywood Art School.

At length the whole of the combined fleet was under way: even their jury-rigged capture, the Hannibal, towed by the French frigate Indienne, was creeping out to the point. And now the shrill squealing fife and fiddle broke out aboard the Caesar as her people manned the capstan bars and began to warp her out of the mole, taut, trim and ready for war. A thundering cheer ran all along the crowded shore, from the batteries, walls and hillside black with spectators; and when it died away there was the garrison band playing Come cheer up my lads, ’tis to glory we steer as loud as ever they could go, while the Caesar’s marines answered with Britons strike home. Through the cacophony the fife could still be heard: it was most poignantly moving.

She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring--to strike--when the band behind her fired up the school song: "Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High." " He said in an interview on video this... ""She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring--to strike--when the band behind her fired up the school song: "Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High." " The writers job is to get naked! To hide nothing. To look away from nothing. To look at it. To not blink. To be not embarrassed or shamed of it. Strip it down and lets get down to where the blood is, the bone is. Instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff, luxury! On-Writing

One has to be able to get up and walk away from every social gathering that's a waste of one's time, so Roithamer, to leave behind the nothing faces and the often boundlessly stupid heads, and to walk out and down and into the open air and leave everything connected with this worthless society behind, so Roithamer, one must have the strength and the courage and the relentlessness even toward oneself, to leave all these ridiculous, useless, dim-witted people and heads behind and breathe free, breathe out what's been left behind and breathe in something new, one must abandon at top speed these useless social agglomerations, banded together for their inevitable dim-witted purposes, so as not to become part of these dim-witted social groups, to get back to oneself from these social doings and find peace and light in oneself, so Roithamer. One must have the courage and the strength to break away from such company, such entertainment, such verbal violence and so forth, in which one has become involved against one's will, one must break away under any circumstances, so Roithamer, one must break off every one of these unspeakably stupid conversations, break away and walk away from all these senseless, useless and invariably dangerous subjects, to save oneself, rescue one's own head by escaping at any moment, at any time, from wherever it is, to escape into the open air, so Roithamer. To be honest, almost all the social gatherings we've ever been drawn into, without quite knowing how or why, strike us as useless, they serve no purpose at all, all they do is weaken us. At the right moment we must get up and leave such gatherings, circumstances, conditions, for what naturally becomes a lengthy, lasting, always unending solitude, so Roithamer. Such a rising up and going away is a daily occurrence, always we leave behind a society that repels us, so Roithamer. But as we keep leaving them, they more and more regard us as crazy and hate us, a situation that worsens from day to day, that militates against our head and against our character and against our whole being, so Roithamer.

Um…” The marching band in my bloodstream was now doing double-time maneuvers. “Well, I walked into the throne room one day, and Venus was studying this hologram of you, and I asked—just completely casually, mind you—‘Who’s that?’ And she told me your…your fate, I guess. The thing about healing your heart. Then she just…tore into me. She forbade me to approach you. She said if I ever tried to woo you, she would curse me forever. It was totally unnecessary. And also embarrassing.” Reyna’s expression remained as smooth and hard as marble. “Woo? Is that even a thing anymore? Do people still woo?” “I—I don’t know. But I stayed away from you. You’ll notice I stayed away. Not that I would’ve done otherwise without the warning. I didn’t even know who you were.” She stepped over a fallen log and offered me a hand, which I declined. I didn’t like the way her greyhounds were grinning at me. “So, in other words,” she said, “what? You’re worried Venus will strike you dead because you’re invading my personal space? I really wouldn’t worry about that, Lester. You’re not a god anymore. You’re obviously not trying to woo me. We’re comrades on a quest.” She had to hit me where it hurt—right in the truth. “Yes,” I said. “But I was thinking….” Why was this so hard? I had spoken of love to women before. And men. And gods. And nymphs. And the occasional attractive statue before I realized it was a statue. Why, then, were the veins in my neck threatening to explode? “I thought if—if it would help,” I continued, “perhaps it was destiny that…Well, you see, I’m not a god anymore, as you said. And Venus was quite specific that I shouldn’t stick my godly face anywhere near you. But Venus…I mean, her plans are always twisting and turning. She may have been practicing reverse psychology, so to speak. If we were meant to…Um, I could help you.” Reyna stopped. Her dogs tilted their metal heads toward her, perhaps trying to gauge their master’s mood. Then they regarded me, their jeweled eyes cold and accusatory. “Lester.” Reyna sighed. “What in Tartarus are you saying? I’m not in the mood for riddles.” “That maybe I’m the answer,” I blurted. “To healing your heart. I could…you know, be your boyfriend. As Lester. If you wanted. You and me. You know, like…yeah.” I was absolutely certain that up on Mount Olympus, the other Olympians all had their phones out and were filming me to post on Euterpe-Tube.

The Incredible String Band were the most multi-faceted group in British popular music, and this book attempts to mirror this. Yes, there is stuff about dates and albums and personnel changes, but you’ll also find articles about their experiments with dance, film, theatre and lifestyles. Their music was always intertwined with the places they lived in, from Sixties Edinburgh to West Wales to the Scottish Borders, and these are all featured here. Their songs ranged from early folk-club whimsy to the material on, say, 5000 Spirits or Wee Tam And The Big Huge which, as Rowan Williams says, demanded an intimidating literacy to pick up all the allusions. The range of their musical palette was striking, too.

You’re awfully quiet,” Mark observed. “I was just wondering,” I said. “Wondering if he’ll ever tell her.” Mark cocked his head to one side, his eyes on Elaine and Alex. “I doubt it,” he said after a moment. “Crawford strikes me as the true-blue type. Now that Jo O’Connor’s dead…” He let his voice trail off. “Pretty much what I was thinking,” I said. “Of course,” Mark said promptly, “if he knew that Jo was still alive…” “You never give up, do you?” I asked. He gave me his devil’s grin. “Nope. So whaddaya think, Calloway? Do I get that dance?” “Let’s see the cummerbund.” His expression blandly agreeable, Mark stood up. I laughed before I could help myself. Mark’s cummerbund was black with hot pink polka dots. “I believe I specified plaid,” I said. “Give me a break here, will you Calloway? I got the ugliest one I could find.” “You definitely did do that,” I said. I looked up, meeting his eyes. “One dance,” I said. “We’re supposed to be working, you know.” “One dance,” he agreed as the first dance ended and the crowd applauded. He held out a hand. I took it and let him ease me out onto the dance floor. The band settled into its first slow number and Mark London pulled me slowly but surely into his arms.

With the first rays of dawn coming from a huge orange sun, rising out of the Indian Ocean from the East, the Dominion Monarch passed the Durban bluffs and entered the protected harbor. A police boat escorted the ship in and stood by as it was secured. Everybody crowded close to the railings and looked down onto the concrete dock. From the ship you could see that there were police cars blocking the entry to the wharf area and it became quite apparent that something was amiss. The reason was soon made clear when the loudspeakers announced that before clearing the ship, everyone on board would be required to get a smallpox vaccination or present their international immunization card, to verify that they were in compliance. There had been an outbreak of smallpox and yellow fever throughout Africa especially in the Cape Province and in tribal areas. During the previous year, nearby Northern Rhodesia had reported several thousand cases of these diseases. The police boat lay in wait, until every last one of the passengers was immunized. It took hours, however everyone was happy when the health officials finally came aboard to do the vaccinating. Finally the announcement came that the ship was cleared so that we could go ashore. Not until then did the band strike up and play “God Save the King.

No glory found and no guilt ever apportioned For those guiding young men to wars uncautioned, The chosen so often of colour, unlearned or the piss poor. But true heroes you’ll be if you win by force majeure. No glory found and no guilt ever apportioned For those guiding young men to wars uncautioned, Ticker tape parades and medals for those making it home, For the rest, your name on a glorious memorial dome. No glory found and no guilt ever apportioned For those guiding young men to wars uncautioned, But see those with the wealth they do not give a toss Knowing their greedy interests will not turn a loss. No glory found and no guilt ever apportioned For those guiding young men to wars uncautioned, Not their sons to die in some foreign land But here they come marching so strike up the band. No glory found, and no guilt ever apportioned For those guiding young men to wars uncautioned.

With the first rays of dawn coming from a huge orange sun, rising out of the Indian Ocean from the East, the Dominion Monarch passed the Durban bluffs and entered the protected harbor. A police boat escorted the ship in and stood by as it was secured. Everybody crowded close to the railings and looked down onto the concrete dock. From the ship you could see that there were police cars blocking the entry to the wharf area and it became quite apparent that something was amiss. The reason was soon made clear when the loudspeakers announced that before clearing the ship, everyone on board would be required to get a smallpox vaccination or present their international immunization card, to verify that they were in compliance. There had been an outbreak of smallpox and yellow fever throughout Africa especially in the Cape Province and in tribal areas. During the previous year, nearby Northern Rhodesia had reported several thousand cases of these diseases. It took hours, however everyone was happy when the health officials finally came aboard to do the vaccinating. The police boat lay in wait, until every last one of the passengers was immunized. Finally the announcement came that the ship was cleared so that we could go ashore. Not until then did the band strike up and play “God Save the King.

A big part of what separates childhood from adulthood is discernment - the apprehension of the world's dizziness, the channeling of its everythingness into sensible categories. This goes for intake and output alike, with a large part of growing up being an education in behavioral propriety and conversational relevance. The sort of transmodality by which a person becomes a bag of groceries (as in "Dead") makes much less sense to a well-adjusted, reasoning adult than to a child, who has encountered few models that explain either where people ultimately go or where grocery bags really come from. This plays into why the band's music always strikes adult reviewers as quirky, but can seem unremarkably factual to young kids... ...They Might Be Giants provide a particularly safe sort of rebelliousness - one that is more invested in negating boundaries than breaking through them. It allows for individuality without getting dangerous. And, if we're being honest, this is part of what makes it ideal music for the middle school 'gifted' set, a group of variously outcast kids who, nevertheless, don't actually want to piss off their parents.

Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful.

The public space of the museum is not my favorite, loud and full of tourists and school groups and hungry hordes. Their curiosity is endearing---they're acolytes for the natural world. And the marble gleams with architectural detail and precious objects all around. But on these, my gray days, entering the building carries the weight of death: all the specimens, thousands of carcasses of every species, stuffed or otherwise retrieved from oblivion so we can know them, yet all dead. The birds I draw and paint, all dead. On these days, my only defense is to imagine every pinned butterfly taking wing, every stuffed marsupial waking up, every preserved plant specimen blooming and carpeting the marble floor like a time-lapse forest, and every bird coming to life, flying up to the dome and away. On the days when the fog comes and hooks into my gut like a sharp-toothed parasite, these visions can save me. The steadier, more consistent salvation, of course, is the work. I can lose myself for hours drawing, for instance, the common loon, with its inky head, white banding at the neck, and an intricacy of pin dots and fractured rectangles cascading across the wings. With the right precision, I can bring the deadness of a bird skin to a striking facsimile of life.

So how do you help your Band-Aid solution stand out with people who don’t know they’re cut? You cut them! Of course, I’m not suggesting you cause any physical harm to your customers. Rather, you should adopt an approach that clearly conveys the problem you solve in advance of communicating the way you solve it. For example, back at my third start-up, when positioning our new-age feedback, coaching, and recognition solution, we could have invoked statements like: “We help employees get the feedback they need to perform their best and grow their careers.” “We help managers become great coaches.” “We help promote your amazing culture by making winning behaviors visible.” All imply that employees don’t get enough feedback at work, managers can often be poor coaches, and your people do amazing things that not everyone sees: fair points and all problems there is value in addressing. But they are also statements that are easy to dismiss. After all, many organizations already feel they provide their employees with sufficient levels of the feedback, coaching, and recognition they crave. We found prospects were much more responsive to our pitch when we preceded those statements with messages like: “Seventy percent of people leave their company because of a poor relationship with their manager.” “Most millennial employees use the word ‘hate’ to describe how they feel about performance reviews.” “Four out of ten employees are actively disengaged at work and cost companies millions in lost productivity.” Why did this approach work so well? The messages were striking. They were laden with specific and compelling statistics. And they invoked real business pains. They made the customer realize that they were already experiencing a loss. In other words, they were bleeding and in need of a Band-Aid.

At length the whole of the combined fleet was under way: even their jury-rigged capture, the Hannibal, towed by the French frigate Indienne, was creeping out to the point. And now the shrill squealing fife and fiddle broke out aboard the Caesar as her people manned the capstan bars and began to warp her out of the mole, taut, trim and ready for war. A thundering cheer ran all along the crowded shore, from the batteries, walls and hillside black with spectators; and when it died away there was the garrison band playing Come cheer up my lads, ’tis to glory we steer as loud as ever they could go, while the Caesar’s marines answered with Britons strike home. Through the cacophony

Leave him alone,” Eddi said quietly. “We’re not on the battlefield now.” “No, we aren’t—quite.” The woman returned her attention to Eddi. “And there are better targets.” She set her black hat on her head at a striking angle, casting a diagonal of shadow across her features. “Again,” she said to Eddi, “a marvelous band, and I was delighted to meet you. I’m sure we’ll see one another soon.” And she left the gallery, her heels making small, sharp noises with the measured cadence of her stride. “Front door’s locked,” Eddi said thoughtfully. “Oh,” Willy replied, “She’ll get out.” The phouka sank down on the edge of the stage and buried his face in his hands. Eddi hurried to him, alarmed. “Phouka…?” “Heart failure,” he murmured through his fingers. “I warned you, my primrose, that I would be like to die of it, should you go on as you have.” She made a disgusted noise and pulled his hair. He lowered his hands and grinned wickedly up at her. “Creep,” she said. “All right, guys, who was that?” Hedge looked at his feet. The phouka drew breath to answer, but it was Willy who spoke first. “The Queen of Air and Darkness.

what happened in Norway? The usual and then the startlingly unusual happened. Casino initially met with the anticipated wall of disapproval, the usual ‘No’ at every stop. And then at Mercury/Phonogram, during a meeting with the strikingly prescient gentleman of fine breeding and obvious good taste, the honourable Audun Tylden, he met with the absurdly unusual, a resounding ‘Ja’. According to Casino, Audun Tylden cranked up the tape machine, heard the first 15 bars of ‘Tumble With Me’, turned to Cas and yelled, ‘I love it!’ or, actually, ‘Jeg elsker det!’ This is stunning news, great news, unbelievable news. The Hollywood Brats finally have a record deal. There’s just one slight snag. The Hollywood Brats no longer exist.

The beneficiary of this regime of specialists ought to be the happiest of mortals —or so we are expected to believe. All of his vital concerns are in the hands of certified experts. He is a certified expert himself and as such he earns more money in a year than all his great-grandparents put together. Between stints at his job he has nothing to do but mow his lawn with a sit-down lawn mower, or watch other certified experts on television. At suppertime he may eat a tray of ready-prepared food, which he and his wife (also a certified expert) procure at the cost only of money, transportation, and the pushing of a button. For a few minutes between supper and sleep he may catch a glimpse of his children, who since breakfast have been in the care of education experts, basketball or marching-band experts, or perhaps legal experts. The fact is, however, that this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world. He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstances and the power of other people. From morning to night he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride. For all his leisure and recreation, he feels bad, he looks bad, he is overweight, his health is poor. His air, water, and food are all known to contain poisons. There is a fair chance that he will die of suffocation. He suspects that his love life is not as fulfilling as other people’s. He wishes that he had been born sooner, or later. He does not know why his children are the way they are. He does not understand what they say. He does not care much and does not know why he does not care. He does not know what his wife wants or what he wants. Certain advertisements and pictures in magazines make him suspect that he is basically unattractive. He feels that all his possessions are under threat of pillage. He does not know what he would do if he lost his job, if the economy failed, if the utility companies failed, if the police went on strike, if the truckers went on strike, if his wife left him, if his children ran away, if he should be found to be incurably ill. And for these anxieties, of course, he consults certified experts, who in turn consult certified experts about their anxieties. It is rarely considered that this average citizen 1s anxious because he ought to be because he still has some gumption that he has not yet given up in deference to the experts. He ought to be anxious, because he is helpless. That he is dependent upon so many specialists, the beneficiary of so much expert help, can only mean that he is a captive, a potential victim. If he lives by the competence of so many other people, then he lives also by their indulgence; his own will and his own reasons to live are made subordinate to the mere tolerance of everybody else. He has one chance to live what he conceives to be his life: his own small specialty within a delicate, tense, everywhere-strained system of specialties. From a public point of view, the specialist system is a failure because, though everything is done by an expert, very little is done well. Our typical industrial or professional product is both ingenious and shoddy. The specialist system fails from a personal point of view because a person who can do only one thing can do virtually nothing for himself. In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists

They were, David decided, a very colourful lot, but apart from Herries himself he was unable, during those first weeks, to strike up a friendship with any one of them. It was as though he had joined a band of castaways on a desert island, the lone survivor of a subsequent wreck, and at first he was inclined to view his isolation as the inevitable result of his own mental confusion. In the end he took his problem to Herries. 'In a sense you are an outsider, my dear chap,' he said, 'and that's the reason I grabbed you the moment you showed up. You're the bridge, don't you see? A passage over a generation gap, and it isn't the conventional generation gap we all have to cross if we know our business properly. Your gap, caused by the war, is semi permanent. It might take twenty years to close.' 'But some of the chaps on the staff are only a year or so older than I am,' David argued. 'There's the C.3 men, and Carter.' 'It's not a matter of years, but of experience, don't you see? What are our casualties to date? Not far short of three million, I'd say, and a third of them dead at eighteen-plus. No one who hasn't been out can imagine what it's like. Mentally a man like you must have aged about a year every month, and that makes you immeasurably senior to theorists like me, and faithful old buffers like Cordwainer, Acton and Gibbs. Someone has to tackle the job of nudging all those young rascals over the threshold into what I sincerely hope will be an entirely new world. We can't do it because we're even more adrift than they are and haven't a compass reading between us. In a year or so I daresay we can find you some help. Hang it all, everyone in his early twenties can't be dead or maimed or gassed. In the meantime you're on your own, lad.

They are loud and boisterous, skylarking in the way that so many men in their twenties do – only just making the train, with the plumped-up platform guard blowing his whistle in furious disapproval. After messing about with the automatic door – open, shut, open, shut – which they inevitably find hilarious beyond the facts, they settle into the seats nearest the luggage racks. But then, apparently spotting the two girls from Cornwall, they glance knowingly at each other and head further down the carriage to the seats directly behind them. I smile to myself. See, I’m no killjoy. I was young once. I watch the girls go all quiet and shy, one widening her eyes at her friend – and yes, one of the men is especially striking, like a model or a member of a boy band. And it all reminds me of that very particular feeling in your tummy. You know. So I am not at all surprised or in the least bit disapproving when the men stand up and the good-looking one then leans over the top of the dividing seats, wondering if he might fetch the girls something from the buffet, ‘. . . seeing as I’m going?’ Next there are name swaps and quite a bit of giggling, and the dance begins. Two coffees and four lagers later, the young men have joined the girls – all seated near enough for me to follow the full conversation. I know, I know. I really shouldn’t be listening, but we’ve been over this. I’m bored, remember. They’re loud. So then. The girls repeat what I have already gleaned from their earlier gossiping. This trip to London is their first solo visit to the capital – a gift from their parents to celebrate the end of GCSEs. They are booked into a budget hotel, have tickets for Les Misérables and have never been this excited. ‘You kidding me? You really never been to London on your own before?’ Karl, the boy-band lookalike, is amazed. ‘Can be a tricky place, you know, girls. London. You need to watch yourselves. Taxi not tube when you get out of the theatre. You hear me?’ I am liking Karl now. He is recommending shops and market stalls – also a club where he says they will be safe if they fancy some decent music and dancing after the show. He is writing down the name on a piece of paper for them. Knows the bouncer. ‘Mention my name, OK?’ And then Anna, the taller of the two friends from Cornwall, is wondering about the black bags and I am secretly delighted that she has asked, for I am curious also, smiling in anticipation of the teasing. Boys. So disorganised. What are you like, eh?

What many people fail to understand is that coming out doesn't happen all at once. There is no gay correlation to a bar mitzvah or confirmation, in which you read the sacred texts of Oscar Wilde in front of friends and family and then receive a rainbow flag from Ellen DeGeneres, who drapes it about your shoulders as a disco band strikes up "I'm Coming Out.

Of the entire gamut of reforms proposed by Gorbachev, glasnost really did work and rapidly changed everything. Unlike everything else, to achieve it, you didn't have to do anything; you had only not to do anything. You hade to not prohibit, not censor, not dismiss journalists for articles they wrote. Stories began appearing in the press that made you wonder how they ever got published. It soon became clear that writing the truth was actually profitable: you were not kicked out of your job, no "administrative conclusions" were drawn, you became wildly popular, and the circulations of publications you worked for went through the roof. The ideological dam had begun to crack, and although the Soviet leaders tried desperately to shore it up, they couldn't. The news that a program had been removed from the national television channel's schedule provoked instant fury, as if these very protesters had not been living a year previously in a country where censorship was total...From 1987 onward the U.S.S.R. moved rapidly toward winning the world championship for free speech. The realization that you no longer went to prison for anything you said so delighted everyone that people tried to make up for the preceding seventy years lost to censorship. In October 1987 the national channel began airing Vzglyad (Viewpoint), which came to mean everything to me....Young presenters, also unlike the standard officious old codgers, covered a wide variety of news stories and discussed them in the studio. From time to time this was interrupted by videos of bands like DDT, Alisa, Kino, and Nautilus Pompilius. Seeing rock musicians with their socially relevant and often anti-Soviet songs on national television was fantastic. This was no longer a crack in the dam of censorship, but more like seeing it under fire from heavy artillery....For four years, Vzglyad was unquestionably the most popular broadcast in the Soviet Union. Its journalists and presenters became superstars who determined the way television developed. Their subsequent fates have been strikingly different. Vladislav Listyev, the mainstay of Vzglyad, was shot dead in the entrance to his apartment complex. Artyom Borovik, who had become one of the top investigative journalists, died in an airplane accident in 2000; my daughter went to a school named after him. Alexander Lyubimov, the Vzglyad journalist I most adored, now roams the state-run television and radio studios as a diligent Putinite. In 2007, when Putin's censorship was in full bloom, he invited me on his talk show on a radio station run by the state-owned gas company Gazprom. He was as smart as ever, had the same intonations I remembered so well from my childhood, but now was pushing the official line and had a clear understanding of what could be said and what was banned. I looked at him and the whole time felt such an urge to say, "For heaven's sake, Alexander, I became who I am thanks to you and your colleagues. For some reason, you betrayed all that." After Vzglyad, Konstantin Ernst hosted Matador, a program about the movies, every broadcast of which I watched. He now heads Channel One of state television and is a major Putin propagandist. The most repulsive, deceitful reports, including the infamous lie about a little Russian boy allegedly crucified by Ukrainian soldiers in front of his mother, aired on his watch... It seems incredible to believe that most of these people, who were at the wellspring of free speech in Russia, did not just hold their tongues after giving in to the temptation of easy money, but brought the same energy and initiative of their early days to bear as active propagandists of the new regime, foaming at the mouth as they defended acts of injustice and corruption.

One has to be able to get up and walk away from every social gathering that's a waste of one's time, so Roithamer, to leave behind the nothing faces and the often boundlessly stupid heads, and to walk out and down and into the open air and leave everything connected with this worthless society behind, so Roithamer, one must have the strength and the courage and the relentlessness even toward oneself, to leave all these ridiculous, useless, dim-witted people and heads behind and breathe free, breathe out what's been left behind and breathe in something new, one must abandon at top speed these useless social agglomerations, banded together for their inevitable dim-witted purposes, so as not to become part of these dim-witted social groups, to get back to oneself form these social doings and find peace and light in oneself, so Roithamer. One must have the courage and the strength to break away from such company, such entertainment, such verbal violence and so forth, in which one has become involved against one's will, one must break away under any circumstances, so Roithamer, one must break off every one of these unspeakably stupid conversations, break away and walk away from all these senseless, useless and invariably dangerous subjects, to save oneself, rescue one's own head by escaping at any moment, at any time, from wherever it is, to escape into the open air, so Roithamer. To be honest, almost all the social gatherings we've ever been drawn into, without quite knowing how or why, strike us as useless, they serve no purpose at all, all they do is weaken us. At the right moment we must get up and leave such gatherings, circumstances, conditions, for what naturally becomes a lengthy, lasting, always unending solitude, so Roithamer. Such a rising up and going away is a daily occurrence, always we leave behind a society that repels us, so Roithamer. But as we keep leaving them, they more and more regard us as crazy and hate us, a situation that worsens from day to day, that militates against our head and against our character and against our whole being, so Roithamer.