Charlotte Street Read Online Free PDF

people who just don’t know what to do with themselves, or who like to impress other people on the tube by turning to the Live In London section and circling avant garde Mexican jazz fusion gigs they’ll never go to, and would mispronounce anyway.
    There’s the usual mix of other stuff: news straight from our inbox, horoscopes bought in from some mental with a fax machine in the country, pap pics of pop stars and comics stumbling out of the Groucho or Century, there are On This Days,and Did You Knows, and I Saw Yous, and other ways to start a sentence no one will ever want to hear you finish.
    It’s also doomed. We all know it, but there’s only so much a vanity project can do in a market like this. They’d managed a successful launch in Manchester and simply thought they could add a little London content and start a whole new paper in the capital. It was a little swagger in a knee-deep recession, a bold move with a bit of Russian money behind it, but it was Zoe and the team who now had to deal with it day-to-day.
    And God, I just listened to myself. I sound ungrateful. And I think I may be giving you a picture of myself I’m not entirely comfortable with. I enjoy the job when there’s enough of it, I have my savings, and being freelance means I have to turn my hand to anything, but that’s also kind of the problem. I have no speciality. I am not
London
Now’s resident
anything
. I’m just a general reviewer, giving general thoughts to the general public about things in general.
    Well, I say ‘general thoughts’. That’s not quite true. These thoughts aren’t my general thoughts. They’re extreme versions. Because you have to have an opinion. Last week, I went to a Persian in Bayswater called Sinbad. I suppose if I was still a teacher, I’d have marked it like this:
    Starter: Yep, fine, absolutely fine, nothing special, but okay
.
    Main: Not bad, I ate it all, so yeah
.
    Overall: This place is okay, so if you’re in the area, and you are hungry, and you like Persian food, give it a go, or not. I’m not fussed
.
    But now I can’t get away with that. Now I have to say things like:
    Starter: Bland, turgid, ironically a non-starter
.
    Main: Insult to possible internal injury
.
    Overall: Irritatingly forgettable. If it were a name referring to its food, Sinbad could not be made up of two more apt syllables
.
    You see? Ha ha. I am clever.
    More barbed, more cynical, more knowing. And all from a man who once gave himself food poisoning cooking chips.
    Zoe loved it. She loves all this kind of stuff. And I guess I do it to impress her a bit. Partly because it means she’ll give me more work, but partly also because it’s nice to impress a girl.
    I suppose if I were still a teacher, I would mark her like this:
    Appearance: Zoe Alice Harper is neat and tidy with an eye for the latest fashions, as evidenced by the very many ASOS bags that litter the area around her desk. Her hair, once a long chestnut mane, is now cut into a bob, which is the type of thing that can happen when you have a ‘long lunch’ and are feeling unnaturally gregarious in the stylist’s chair. Zoe would do well to remember this in future
.
    Attitude: Zoe is a girl with ambition and drive, whose work is consistent and above average, although her greatest dream, I think, if I can break character for just a moment, is to work on one of those I Hate Everything columns. You know the ones. The ones that tell you everything is appalling. Every new TV show or story in the news has some terrible downside to it that is a complete affront to the person writing it, furious that they could have spent their time doing other, more important things, like microwaving some pasta, or staring. That they could have done a better job, even though they’d never make it past the first wave of interviews
.
That everything would be better if they were in charge. Problem is, I don’t think she’s really like that. It’s just the trend. A way to get noticed. A