i once heard a very astute observation
about nations,
  from a mind that only reached
the age of 18...
Anthony, a gay, from Barnet in
north london, when we shared a flat
at our first year at Edinburgh...
he said, and to this very day his
words burn in my mind -
(he was the first student i had a beer
with, and he gave me
the manic street preacher's magnum opus
album: generation terrorists...
huge fan, and a music buff in general)...
then there was bruce who
was in corny ****, like nina simone,
ella fitzgerald, sam cooke, queen,
                     marvin ******* gay?
seriously?!
                  the ****'s this: a motown
convention?
                              i like the music,
but i prefer making fun of it more,
with one exception: -
                  don't know much about history,
don't know much biology,
don't know much about a science book,
   don't know much about the french
i took,
             but i do know that i love you,
and that i know that you love me too,
        what a wonderful world this would be:
neil armstrong had hide and
            use his horn to hide skittles.
who was that other guy?
     i just remember he cycled,
  and one time he shaved his head in the bath
and the bath was filled - tom! - vacuum cleaners! -
dyson! yeah, that guy -
  shaved his head in the bath, and didn't
clean it up, so i says to the rest of them:
i'm not his mama, ******* if you
think i'm going to clean this **** up...
the same guy (tom) who found
white vinegar strange...
      sure, the label had written on it
the word ocet - slavic, which is used to
dilute and invigorate a mizeria, no,
not misery - cucumber salad,
     onion, dill, white vinegar, salt, pepper,
cucumbers, mayo and crème fraîche...
what, only seen the brown stuff?
funny though, i remember the first
meal anthony made for himself,
  salted pasta...
      he looked so helpless...
yeah, that's what it was, you heard me:
boiled pasta, with some salt sprinkled
over it.
reference to bruce from derby?
        catchphrase ding, ****! -
and that one night he came back from
drinking on the town with the guy
that dropped out and started working
on an oil rig... the moans and screams
and puking into the toilet while we all laughed...
hey, no featherweight gets to bash up
a heavyweight... ha ha...
tom never ate on a plate, and he only cooked
pasta, and used a dolmino tomato sauce...
see, some people have a knack at being
observable, so repetitive they're as familiar
as a chair is familiar, next to a table...
   repetitively mundane and easily remembered...
aha! but was once the time he actually
figured out to put some chicken into
the sauce, so it wasn't merely pasta
  and tomato sauce...
    **** me, that year i travelled millennia -
back into the caves...
who raised these boys, wolves?!
        i have to admit i had my faux pas moment,
when i made a cinnamon rice pudding...
ugh...
   and i did call my mother most of the days,
not out of loneliness,
neither of my parents were at university,
i was the journalist.
                        so i didn't wash the bath,
i just when upstairs to where four girls
  flat and had a shower there.
- oh right, what anthony said:
   no great nation can claim currency in
the geopolitical world,
that hasn't been baptised by a civil war
(not verbatim) -
true, america, russia, england, spain, france,
      germany(?), japan (ronin wars)...
                    i agree, but then there's
the other type of nation,
  well, there are only two that i known of:
poland & israel.
                      with a spell of being non-existent
for a while,
obviously israel being non-existent
is *******
and poland is pale by comparison
  (i don't write fiction, simply because
i remember all the little details
of the people i've met) -
              these transitionally non-existent
nations have a staggering
sense of immediacy -
point to make:
            england is a nation of nostalgia...
back to the empire,
  and since remembrance day is
coming up...
  always with the ****** poppies -
you can seriously start to see that world
war II didn't even happen,
since the focus is on world war I is
remembered more...
guess it must have the stupider war of
the two...
                             but the difference between
a nation baptised by civil war,
  and a nation having a non-existence interlude
is much different...
there's no nostalgia,
     i could be nostalgic about
the 16th / 17th height of
     the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
the largest nation in europe,
       from the baltic to the black sea -
but i'm actually more engrossed in
the fact that poland, the football team,
  will for the first time in history be
allocated a group in the world cup,
   be first picked, allocated...
                          i admit that civil
wars create formidable nations,
                     but... i don't even know how
to call the nations which dipped into
non-existence for a while...
           perhaps it's only with there being
less nostalgia in the latter nations
  than in the former:
  managing decline vs. declining to manage -
sure, save some money,
sell the house, buy a flat...
  but there wasn't really a decline of poland,
or israel,
      it was more a disappearing act,
a magic trick, ****! gone 18th century,
****! back on the map in the 19th century
as a satellite in the form of the duchy
of warsaw...
                 and you will actually find every
living pole without a nostalgia for
the zenith...
       there's only a joke running:
   an old man will always say -
i don't even which republic this is,
                     third, fourth... fifth?!