The British love a nice "depravations of teenagers" story, especially one involving a trashed country house. Sarah Ruscoe put posters up at her school inviting "everyone" to her 18th birthday party, little understanding that the word "everyone" was sufficiently vague as to allow more than 500 partygoers to descend on her family's Devon manse. The result: "smashed furniture and beer-sprayed walls." Perhaps a sedate tea party would be more appropriate to celebrate her 19th.
Like all journalists, I think I have a book in me, probably lodged somewhere between my duodenum and jejunum. But how to get it out, short of a scalpel? Stuart Jeffries provides the answer in today's Guardian: Spend precisely 365 days doing some thing. He mentions such titles as "The Year of Reading Proust," "My Year Inside Radical Islam" and ""My Year of Living Biblically." I don't know what I could do every day for a year, short of brushing my teeth. I don't think "My Year of Reading the Guardian" wouldn't shift many units.
I promise I'm not the sort of blogger who throws up any old tripe that lands in his e-mail inbox. And yet here I am doing exactly that: This is a video of a leprechaun. A PR company in Alexandria, Virginia, sent it to me. I have no idea why. It's so corny you may need to floss your teeth after watching it.
But it does remind me to say "Happy St. Patrick's Day." Of course, I'm the worst kind of Irish American. I have no idea where "my people" came from and feel only the most tenuous connection to the Motherland. I do like Guinness, though, and I suppose I'll raise a pint tonight.
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7 comments:
When Old Oilman Getty lived in England, perhaps for tax reasons, and threw a rare party at his huge mansion (was it in Surrey?), all sorts of people crashed it and left the place a mess. Destructive behaviour transcends the generations. Besides, people must have thought Getty was rich enough to afford it.
Um, did you mean the "depradations" of apparently depraved teenagers? Or their deprivations?
Jeffries is right - the possibilities are endless. I think I'll start working on my books right now. The first one? My Year of Reading About John Kelly's Year in England...
A year without decent plumbing? Amongst the snaggle-toothed natives?
@MEB: No, I meant "depravation," a noun which menas:
moral perversion; impairment of virtue and moral principles; "the luxury and corruption among the upper classes"; "moral degeneracy followed intellectual degeneration"; "its brothels, its opium parlors, its depravity"; "Rome had fallen into moral putrefaction"
@Richard: No one would believe me.
John
Are you sure that isn't you in the leprechaun video??
@anonymous: I'm short and fat but not THAT short and fat.
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