Kellyanne crawled into my bedroom through the car door. Her face was puffy and pale and fuzzed-over. She just came in and said: ‘Ashmol! Pobby and Dingan are maybe-dead.’ That’s how she said it.
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“I’m looking for my daughter’s imaginary friends and you’d better bloody well believe it, mate!”
Kellyanne crawled into my bedroom through the car door. Her face was puffy and pale and fuzzed-over. She just came in and said: ‘Ashmol! Pobby and Dingan are maybe-dead.’ That’s how she said it.
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
Ben Rice is the author of a Pobby and Dingan and Etiquette. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2001 and was named one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta in 2003.
More about the author →‘When I came back from Gwen's I had expected to find him in the throes of his midlife koisis—you know—trimming an anal fin in the bath, or nursing a slime coat at the very least.’
‘I left Australia at the age of twenty, carrying with me everything I thought I would need.’
‘By the end of our journey together we had signally failed to understand each other, yet an unlikely, even unprecedented connection had formed.’
‘I lost my own father at 12 yrs. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences’.
‘Empires fall like milk teeth.’
Stephanie Sy-Quia on her collection Amnion.
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