Oh, hello again It's raining outside, my toes are soaking, so I thought I'd write to you. It's been a while since I've had anything to say. I thought I'd find out some stuff about Belle and Sebastian and astonish you with it. So I watched some telly. We love 1997 didn't mention Belle and Sebastian at all. It started me thinking that in history books of the future, the sort you'd have beamed directly into your brain, most of the things that I think are important wouldn't make it in there at all. They wouldn't have a chance. People would be having their retro nineties parties and dressing up as H from Steps not Stuart Murdoch. And I decided that in a few years time when everyone's listening to their space music and eating moon-toast, sinister might be the only thing from my version of the world that's left. Then I thought I'd write to you. Because Sinister’s a repository for our thoughts, isn’t it? It’s as close as we can get to carving things in stone these days. We carve things into electromagnetic bleeps instead. I remember reading somewhere, not long ago, about an ancient philosopher, and how he hadn’t written anything down but historians had still found out all about him and what he thought. The reason they knew, after his teachings had been lost for hundreds of years, was that someone the philosopher knew had kept a diary, and in this diary were all sorts of things about the philosopher and all of his ideas, along with shopping lists and moans about his wife. But the reason archaeologists had found this diary at all, with all its fascinating stories, was because the man had CHISELLED IT INTO HIS BEDROOM WALL, and the archaeologists had found the wall. It took that much. I wonder how solid this Sinister wall of ours is. I started my new job recently. It's not bad, I thought it would be scary but it isn't. I share my office with someone called Paul and he told me he'd started getting strange stalker-like emails from someone he didn't know. She thought he was a poet, and kept telling him how she really liked the poem he'd written on a web-site. I suggested that maybe she'd got the wrong address and asked what his was. "It's foxinthesnow@something.com" "Oh. Fox in the snow? That's a good name." "Yeah, it's a song by a band called Belle and Sebastian." "Oh, I see." Then I told him how I knew that already. I decided that I was going to like Paul. Thing is, there's a good chance his stalker's one of YOU. You freaks! Leave him alone. Someone (sorry I can't remember who) sent in a story about a bloke who drank too much Red Bull. It reminds me of a court case involving a bewhiskered old colonel. The colonel was in the dock for assaulting his secretary. He’d never laid a finger on anyone before, unless you counted all the fuzzy-wuzzys he’d had up the Khyber, and since his moustaches had begun to droop and his military bearings were rusting up a bit he’d become a mellow old fellow. So what had happened? It turned out, as the case unfolded, that with all those long mornings and long afternoons of his retirement, and after they’d killed off Arthur Fowler in Eastenders, the colonel had begun to drink increasing amounts of tea. The usual two or three cups a day weren’t enough anymore, and by the time of the assault he was drinking fifty litres a day. That day the secretary hadn’t had his tea ready for him when he asked – maybe she was trying to get him to give it up – and he lost it, his mind was transported back to his time out East, and he attacked the secretary like she was a native weeing up against the tent. In the end he was acquitted, the official reason was that he had been suffering delusions as a result of his tea addiction. My A to Z reading list isn’t going as well as could be hoped, I’m only up to D, and all the authors I know whose names begin with D, Dickens, Dosdoevsky, etc., write really long books so it’ll take me ages to get to E. Part of the problem is that some letters, like J and M, are going to be really exciting, but there’ll be a lot of other letters to get through before I get to Martine McCutcheon’s autobiography. God, this was long, wasn't it? Sorry if you've fallen asleep. I should be working anyway. bye Stout Robin _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.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. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+