Bit of a Blur Read Online Free PDF Page A

British cultural revolution that reverberated in everything from football to rocket science. There were music students, too, and drama courses, but the art department was where the nineties started.
    I had trouble getting up on Wednesdays and kept missing language laboratory, which was at nine o’clock. I took a 36 bus from Camberwell to New Cross. It is not a glamour run that route, through Peckham and the cheap end of the Old Kent Road, but it never felt like I was in the wrong place, like it did at the supermarket.
    I didn’t miss lingo lab on purpose, but it did gall me a little bit that Brownlee was free to ingest yet more of Wittgenstein’s axioms in the bath when he rose at midday, that Graham would go on skip trawls with Paul, while I listened carefully and repeated, but I enjoyed French. There wasn’t one of the lecturers that I didn’t like. They were all terribly clever. It was a very thorough course. It got reality right up on the jacks and had a good look at the underneath. In cosy classrooms we learned about the birth of language, the dawn of civilisation and the first stories, civilisation’s collapse and the onset of the Dark Ages, architecture, art, and archaic and extant forms of music and verse through the ages. The staff all wrote books with long titles: analyses of the principles of linguistic transference; guides to the medieval romances and the works of the great authors of antiquity.
    The books that we read in the first couple of terms of French were carefully selected to blow our tiny minds. Many of them attacked the core of the cosy existence we led. We loved that. We embarked upon an intellectual cruise; took a tour through the twisted, terrifying thoughtscapes of André Gide. We took a ramble through Rabelais’ ribaldry. We dabbled in Dadaism, supped on surrealism, ripped through Romanticism and embraced existentialism. There was plenty to talk about.
    The college library had very tight security. There must have been millions of pounds’ worth of books in there. They could probably have left the door open, though. Books are the most unlikely things to get stolen in New Cross. Street lamps and traffic lights are more at risk of theft than academic treatises. I didn’t go to the library. I made a point of not going to France and not going to the library while I was there. I think I had an attitude problem. The head of the first year said she wanted to see me about my essays. She seemed quite well connected and I assumed she had found a publisher. I was quite excited when I arrived at her study. Maybe she wanted to discuss some of my new ideas. She was, in fact, appalled, she said, at the standard of my French, and how, she wanted to know, could I hope to express ideas, however original I thought they were, without a grasp of a language? I still thought she was wrong. Conceit is vital.
    While working at Safeway I’d got quite good at copying the illustrations out of Winnie the Pooh and brushing on the watercolour, but my sister Debs has always had much more in the way of visual acuity than me. She can do jigsaws faster than anyone. We knew that she was destined for greatness when she won the Regatta Week pavement drawing competition in Bournemouth when she was five.
    Art was bound to take on a new importance in the environment at Goldsmiths. I’d aligned my on-board compasses with the books and records that I liked, but I didn’t know much about art. There was art going on everywhere - on the upper floors of the main building, in an old car showroom opposite. People were talking about abstract expressionism in the canteen, Fluxus in the bar. There was sculpture, film, installation, photography, painting and drawing but absolutely no one was doing watercolours.
    There were loads of big ideas flying around. Everyone was reading books, listening to records, going to Cork Street and gatecrashing first-night art openings. There were theatre trips, museum visits and gigs in the union. Paul really