Sinister: ends "I can't go on, I'll go on"

[Kieran Devaney]

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, that’s 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 don’t 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 aren’t 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 don’t 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 – it’s 
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 don’t 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 I’ve 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, I’m too timid just to go up to people 
there and ask, but I imagine there’s 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. That’s another thing, actually (I don’t know what the 
first thing was, no) and this is the reason I dislike the people I live with 
here, I’m 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 it’s not 
really that bad, and I’m exaggerating because there are one or two people 
that I get on fairly well with, but some of the others think it’s 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 they’re justified simply 
because they’re students.  Nonetheless, and so this doesn’t 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 I’m just inevitably romanticising the situation – 
but who amongst us can honestly say they’re not? Admittedly, I’m not much of 
a people person, in fact I’d go as far as saying I’m 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, don’t 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 haven’t mentioned those three to everyone I’ve met and 
obviously I’m horribly elitist as well. Then again I wouldn’t exactly regard 
myself as being well read either, who would? This post isn’t 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 wouldn’t?) then that’d 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 haven’t 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




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