I have just spent more than an hour looking for a book for Lauren’s birthday. I am seriously considering giving her this piece instead. If suffering is required, I have suffered enough.

Addendum (September 27, 2000)

I jotted this down in the café inside a bookshop in the Oracle shopping mall in Reading. On my way out, I spotted Howard Sounes’ biography of Charles Bukowski and got it for Lauren without a moment’s hesitation.[1] God bless the old fart.

Footnote

1. Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, Edinburgh: Rebel Inc., 1999 (first published in 1998).