Dear Sinister, How are you? I shall start as the custom dictates and explain my protracted absence from the list of late. No I wont. I was reading all summer I did write a long thing about a pub in Birmingham which I thought about sending but I went off it before I had chance. Alas. Sinister has been a tad dreary in recent times, no wait, thats unfair. I have greatly enjoyed posts by I wont embarrass them by mentioning names but there have been a fair few now that I think about it, and also if I mention someone then any omitted names might feel that I disliked their recent posts when perhaps I liked them and just forgot or was merely indifferent to them. Still, there was one post of fewer words than I have even yet expended which openly poured scorn on another member of the list not to be encouraged, one of the beauties of Sinister is that its relatively sedate pace gives us fair chance to fully work through our viewpoints oh I dont mean we have to indulge in tawdry, strung out dialectics every time we want to say something, but if I were to have an opinion, then Sinister provides both the space and the place for me to extol the virtues of said opinion, perhaps even to play devils advocate, for good and bad can be found in all things. More important than what the opinion is, and more interesting to me and probably the rest of the list is how that opinion is justified and explained, for only then can you be vindicated in having it in the first place. Certainly, if you arent keen on something that someone has said on the list, then no matter how far the extent of your annoyance runs it will still seem crass to resort to base, crude ejaculations of that annoyance. But I wont preach. I dont know how. Given that I asked how you are in my first sentence it only seems fair for you to return the question. Ok. I moved away from seclusion in Birmingham to study English Literature at Sheffield University in September and have since been doing just that, amongst other things. I quite like Sheffield its fairly similar to Birmingham though, to be honest, which is a mixed blessing (cue misty eyed false reminiscences about when places looked different from one another, when regional identity meant something (oh, it does), coincidentally I was in Leeds at the weekend and it, too, looked pretty similar), Sheffield does, however, seem much safer, I have wandered about on my own at 3am and only been threatened by a double-decker Jesus Army bus looking even more lurid in the orange streetlight (please if you have stories or statistics relating to horrendous street crime in Sheffield then please dont send them to me, I wish to remain complacent for as long as possible). I could now go off into a lengthy report on the relative merits and shortcomings of Sheffield and its amenities, but Ive no doubt there are already dozens in circulation which detail things much more accurately than I ever could. I should probably mention Offbeat though, which is a fun place to trot along to every other Friday, and certainly better than any of the clubs in Birmingham, not that I ever went to them I suspect a fair few of the people there are on Sinister, Im too timid just to go up to people there and ask, but I imagine theres at least one or two. For anyone there last Friday, I was the one wearing the lemon yellow tshirt which said Rachel on the back. Thats another thing, actually (I dont know what the first thing was, no) and this is the reason I dislike the people I live with here, Im in Halls of Residence and the people on the same floor as me have taken aversion to the fact that I have committed such heinous crimes as: occasionally wearing girls clothes, occasionally wearing makeup, wearing beads, just dressing like a weirdo, being vegetarian, being teetotal and having a strange taste in music; oh my heart bleeds etc ok so its not really that bad, and Im exaggerating because there are one or two people that I get on fairly well with, but some of the others think its hilarious to get up to such kerazee antics as moving the fridge into the corridor, breaking ceiling tiles by punching them and blasting Eye of The Tiger five times in succession at 2am and thinking that theyre justified simply because theyre students. Nonetheless, and so this doesnt turn into another doom-fest, I am, as I said, quite enjoying Sheffield, I like the freedom of being able to go for an aimless walk whenever the fancy so takes me without having to explain myself to anyone. If anyone is familiar with the poetry of UA Fanthrope, then I would say that life at the moment is a bit like that. Or perhaps Im just inevitably romanticising the situation but who amongst us can honestly say theyre not? Admittedly, Im not much of a people person, in fact Id go as far as saying Im completely inept at conversation and this sentence was definitely going somewhere when I began it hmn - so, which Belle and Sebastian album do you think is the most twee? No wait, dont answer that. No, actually, do. The people on my course? They seem remarkably badly read, for English students, as it goes, no one I have spoken to has yet even heard of, let alone read Pynchon, Naipaul or Perec, though I havent mentioned those three to everyone Ive met and obviously Im horribly elitist as well. Then again I wouldnt exactly regard myself as being well read either, who would? This post isnt really going very far at the moment. Was there anything else? Oh yeah, if anyone in Sheffield wants to meet me (and after this scintillating little whirl who can honestly say they wouldnt?) then thatd be lovely, just form an orderly queue behind the bikesheds, or email me, whichever is the more convenient. I suppose it just remains for me to apologise for not turning up at the Birmingham picnic(s) a couple of months ago, if I havent already, but I think I actually developed an aversion to people during the course of the summer. But. Even catatonia has to duet with Tom Jones every now and again. Love, Kieran _________________________________________________________________ Get faster connections -- switch to MSN Internet Access! http://resourcecenter.msn.com/access/plans/default.asp +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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