Bit of a Blur Read Online Free

seemed to enjoy sleeping out on the front line. You went to see him when you got mugged or menaced and he made you tea. I never needed to go and see him. When I got to know Graham he told me that there was dog poo in the lounge when he went in sometimes.
    Paul Hodgson was the first person I really connected with at college. He was always getting mugged. He still is. I ran into him in the street a few months ago and he had a black eye from a thief. He was set upon by rogues even before he started at Goldsmiths, on his way to the interview. He’s quite a dandy dresser. Maybe that’s what it is. Paul talked a lot about Shelley and Byron. He was doing Fine Art and he made me laugh. The people who did art at my school weren’t that clever, or funny. The clever people did physics and chemistry. Paul was very perceptive and inquisitive. His dad, Ken, was a plumber and Paul manipulated high-falutin’ art concepts in a west London drawl, with a mild stutter. ‘Owls!’ - he called me Als - ‘Maaate, have a word with Brownlee, he’s s-pouting Were-Were-Wittgenstein; the wanger.’ Jason Brownlee was another artist. He had the room opposite me. He had fallen for Wittgenstein, utterly. He hadn’t properly grasped Joy Division lyrics yet; he was straight in the deep end wallowing in a big morass of intellectual spaghetti. Possibly he was looking down the wrong end of his mind, like when you look through a telescope backwards and fall over.
    The Fine Art reading list was all pretty chewy. The undergraduates were encouraged to launch themselves into the wits of the great thinkers and ransack what they needed, like they were trawling through a skip. Paul was dipping his toe into some Nietzsche. He always referred to figures he was engaging with by their Christian names, as a nod to his intimacy with them. It’s a good system. It humanises the mythical characters of human history. When Paul called anyone by their surname, it was a dis. ‘Ner-ner-Nietzsche’s n-not funny at all. No jokes in there, mate,’ he said with a grin.
    It was through Jason and Paul that I got to know Graham. The art department was a member’s club, really. The artists didn’t mix with the rest of the college. I got to know Paul in the kitchen. He was on first-name terms with the abstract expressionists but he had no idea how to feed himself. I had a year of low-budget culinary experimentation behind me. He’d come straight from his mum’s. He didn’t know how pasta worked and was quite spellbound by tomato purée. He had an artist’s fascination with the mundane. There was something magical for him in a tube of tomato purée, a tomato being transformed into its essence and re-presented as a packaged consumer product. Was it more of a tomato or less now? Was it art? Was it good on toast? Jason waded around in the primary flavours like they were huge splashes of bold colour. He always put too much garlic in. His drawings were very dense, too.
    Paul and Jason said I should meet Gra. It rhymed with car, Gra. We went up for some pasta sandwiches. Graham’s door was open and there was loud music. He was a bit drunk. His room was completely full of junk; we’d only been there for three weeks and he’d managed to give the impression that he’d been born there and never tidied up. There were piles of clothes from the flea market, a lot of paintings and posters, some of which were still attached to hoardings. There was a huge fan lying on the floor taking up most of the middle of the room. I’d seen that fan on a skip outside. Stuff was spilling out of cupboards, quite a few records and cassettes but mainly clothes. There was a charm about the magpie clutter. It didn’t look like anyone else’s room, except maybe Paul’s. Paul had a neat little row of books as well, though. Graham only had one book, Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola. It looked like he’d read it a few times. It was dogeared and the spine was all cracked. I was glad Graham had a French