Tyre Shop Quotes

There was a scream of tortured rubber as the tyres caught the boulevard in a harsh left-handed turn, the deafening echo of a Citroën’s exhaust in second gear, a crash into top, then a swiftly diminishing crackle as the car hared off between the shops on the main street towards the coast-road.

The sharpie uniform is perhaps the most unlikely fashion statement you will ever see, a Frankenstein’s monster of baby-doll plucked eyebrows, skinhead-meets-mullet hair, 1970s fat ties and just a hint of bovver boy. Clothes worn too tight and too small. Kerry had prepared a shopping list: • bluebird earrings • three-inch Mary Jane corkie platform shoes • treads (shoes made using recycled tyres for the sole with suede thonging for the upper) • Lee canvas jeans • beachcombers • short white bobby socks • ribbed tights • a short, flared, preferably panelled skirt • satin baggies • a striped Golden Breed t-shirt or a KrestKnit polo shirt • a tight coral necklace from the surf shop • a Conti brand striped cardigan • blue metallic eye shadow from a small pot or a crayon

(Amavia's suicide) But if that carelesse heauens (quoth she) despise The doome of iust reuenge, and take delight To see sad PAGEANTS OF MEN'S MISERIES, As bound by them to liue in liues despight, Yet can they not warne death from wretched wight. Come then, come soone, come sweetest death to mee, And take away this LONG LENT LOATHED LIGHT: Sharpe be thy wounds, but sweet the medicines bee, That long captiued soules from wearie thraldome free. But thou, sweet Babe, whom frowning froward fate Hath made sad witnesse of thy fathers fall, Sith heauen thee deignes to hold in liuing state, Long maist thou liue, and better thriue withall, Then to thy lucklesse parents did befall: Liue thou, and to thy mother dead attest, That cleare she dide from blemish criminall; Thy litle hands embrewd in bleeding brest Loe I for pledges leaue. So giue me leaue to rest. With that a deadly shrieke she forth did throw, That through the wood reecchoed againe, And after gaue a grone so deepe and low, That seemd her tender heart was rent in twaine, Or thrild with point of thorough piercing paine; As gentle Hynd, whose sides with cruell steele Through launched, forth her bleeding life does raine, Whiles the sad pang approching she does feele, Brayes out her latest breach, and vp her eyes doth seele. Which when that warriour heard, dismounting straict From his tall steed, he rusht into the thicke, And soone arriued, where that sad pourtraict Of death and dolour lay, halfe dead, halfe quicke, In whose white alabaster brest did sticke A cruell knife, that made a griesly wound, From which forth gusht a streme of gorebloud thick, That all her goodly garments staind around, And into a deepe sanguine dide the grassie ground. Pittifull spectacle of deadly smart, Beside a bubbling fountaine low she lay, Which she increased with her bleeding hart, And the cleane waues widi purple gore did ray; Als in her lap a louely babe did play His cruell sport, in stead of sorrow dew; For in her streaming blood he did embay His litle hands, and tender ioynts embrew; Pitifull spectacle, as euer eye did view. Out of her gored wound the cruell steele He lighdy snatcht, and did the floudgate stop With his faire garment: then gan softly feele Her feeble pulse, to proue if any drop Of liuing bloud yet in her veynes did hop; Which when he felt to moue, he hoped faire To call backe life to her forsaken shop. ... Not one word more she sayd But breaking off, the end for want of breath, And slyding soft, as downe to sleepe her layd, And ended all her woe in quiet death. That seeing good Sir Guyon, could vneath From tears abstaine, for griefe his hart did grate, And from so heauie sight his head did wreath, Accusing fortune, and too cruell fate, Which plunged had faire Ladie in so wretched state. Then turning to his Palmer said, Old syre Behold the image of mortalitie, And feeble nature cloth’d with fleshly tyre, When raging passion with fierce tyrannie Robs reason of her due regalitie, And makes it seruant to her basest part: The strong it weakens with infirmitie, And with bold furie armes the weakest hart; The strong through pleasure soonest falles, the weake through smart.

Virtually everything of any value in North Korea originates in China, and it mostly reaches the DPRK via Dandong. North Korean officials and businessmen, like the men I met on the train from Beijing, coming cap in hand on state-sponsored shopping trips are everywhere. Easily spotted by their badges proclaiming their loyalty to the various Kims, at night they haunt the Korean restaurants and karaoke bars within view of the DPRK itself. During the day, they congregate on the street by the border post beneath the bridge that leads to North Korea. From the early morning to the late afternoon, the line of trucks waiting to cross into the DPRK tails back down the road. There are warehouses and wholesale shops all along it and a constant procession of North Koreans going in and out of them. They buy spark plugs and coils of wire, generators and tyres, household appliances and kitchenware. The goods are destined for North Korea’s armed forces, more than a million strong, for the few industrial concerns still working, or for the Pyongyang elite.

As a concept, free-trade zones are as old as commerce itself, and were all the more relevant in ancient times when the transportation of goods required multiple holdovers and rest stops. Pre-Roman Empire city-states, including Tyre, Carthage and Utica, encouraged trade by declaring themselves "free cities," where goods in transit could be stored without tax, and merchants would be protected from harm. These tax-free areas developed further economic significance during colonial times, when entire cities- including Hong Kong, Singapore and Gibraltar - were designated as "free ports" from which the loot of colonialism could be safely shipped back to England, Europe or America with low import tariffs. Today, the globe is dotted with variations on these tax-free pockets, from duty-free shops in airports and free banking zones of the Cayman Islands to bonded warehouses and ports where goods in transit are held, sorted and packaged.

Tell me honestly’ he says. ‘Do I look my age?’ Frankly Scobie looks anybody’s age; older than the birth of tragedy, younger than the Athenian death. Spawned in the Ark by a chance meeting and mating of the bear and the ostrich; delivered before term by the sickening grunt of the keel on Ararat. Scobie came forth from the womb in a wheel chair with rubber tyres, dressed in a deer-stalker and a red flannel binder. On his prehensile toes the glossiest pair of elastic-sided boots. In his hand a ravaged family Bible whose fly-leaf bore the words ‘Joshua Samuel Scobie 1870. Honour thy father and thy mother’. To these possessions were added eyes like dead moons, a distinct curvature of the pirate’s spinal column, and a taste for quinqueremes. It was not blood which flowed in Scobie’s veins but green salt water, deep-sea stuff. His walk is the slow rolling grinding trudge of a saint walking on Galilee. His talk is a green-water jargon swept up in five oceans — an antique shop of polite fable bristling with sextants, astrolabes, porpentines and isobars. When he sings, which he so often does, it is in the very accents of the Old Man of the Sea. Like a patron saint he has left little pieces of his flesh all over the world, in Zanzibar, Colombo, Togoland, Wu Fu: the little deciduous morsels which he has been shedding for so long now, old antlers, cuff-links, teeth, hair…. Now the retreating tide has left him high and dry above the speeding currents of time, Joshua the insolvent weather-man, the islander, the anchorite.