The Road to Little Dribbling Read Online Free PDF

What qualities do they possess that endear them to the wider world? We may at once eliminate talent, intelligence, attractiveness, and charm from the equation, so what does that leave? Dainty feet? Fresh, minty breath? I am at a loss to say. Anatomically, many of them don’t even seem quite human. Many have names that suggest they have reached us from a distant galaxy: Ri-Ri, Tulisa, Naya, Jai, K-Pez, Chlamydia, Mo-Ron. (I may be imagining some of these.) As I read the magazine, I kept hearing a voice in my head, like the voice from a 1950s B-movie trailer, saying: “They came from Planet Imbecile!”
    From wherever they spring, they exist in droves now. As if to illustrate my point, just beyond Littlehampton a young man with baggy pants and an insouciant slouch boarded the bus and took a seat across from me. He was wearing a baseball cap several sizes too large for his head. Only his outsized ears kept it from falling over his eyes. The bill of the cap was steamrollered flat and still had its shiny, hologram-like price sticker attached. Across the brow in large capitals was the word “OBEY.” Earphones were sending booming sound waves through the magnificent interstellar void of his cranium, on a journey to find the distant, arid mote that was his brain. It must have been a little like the hunt for the Higgs boson. If you took all the young men in southern England with those caps and that slouch and collected them all together in one room, you still wouldn’t have enough IQ points to make a halfwit.
    I turned to the second magazine, Shut the Fuck Up! In this one, I learned that Katie Price was not perhaps the paragon of wise counsel that I had to this point assumed. Here we were given a guided tour of Ms. Price’s dazzlingly commodious love life. This included three marriages, two broken engagements, several children, and seven other earnest but short-lived commitments—and this was just the most recent fragment of her busy existence. All of Ms. Price’s relationships were stupendously unsatisfactory, none more so than the latest. She had married a fellow named Kieran, whose chief talent, I believe, was an ability to make his hair stand up in interesting ways. Not long after they moved into Katie’s 1,100-room mansion, Katie discovered that Kieran had been romping with her very best (now presumably formerly very best) friend. As if this were not enough (and in Ms. Price’s world very little ever is), she discovered that another of her very best friends was also road-testing Kieran. Ms. Price was understandably furious. I think we could be looking at the Buckingham Palace of vaginal makeovers here.

    Turning the page, I found a heartwarming profile of a couple named Sam and Joey, whose talents I was genuinely unable to identify. I would be interested to know if anyone could. Sam and Joey were evidently very successful, for they were looking for a large property in Essex—“ideally a castle,” a friend reported. It was at this point that I realized that my brain was dripping onto the pages, so I put the magazine down, and instead watched the passing suburban scene outside my window.
    Gradually, helplessly, and with many fitful jerks of the head, I lapsed into the deepest of slumbers.
    —
    I awoke with a start and found myself in some uncertain place. The bus had stopped beside a town park, large, rectangular and green, and busy with people. It was bounded on three sides by small hotels and apartment buildings, and was open to the sea on the fourth. It was very fetching. Immediately outside my window and running away from the park was a pedestrian lane that looked appealing, too. Perhaps this was Hove. I had heard that Hove was very nice. I stumbled hastily off the bus and wandered about a bit, wondering how I could find out where I was. I couldn’t bring myself to approach anyone and say, “Excuse me, where am I?” so I just wandered until I came to an information board that informed me I was in Worthing.

    I