Chris Stanley's Bazaar

A few weeks ago, I paid three pounds for a concert ticket. Depending on what year it is, this could be an enormous extravagance or a huge bargain, but in the middle of 2020 I think we can broadly agree that it’s a waste of time. However, this was no investment. The ticket isn’t likely to be worth more than what I paid for it in years to come, but I wanted it anyway. When it arrived, professionally clamped between two slices of cardboard and sealed in a plastic wallet, my heart felt a little shaft of sunlight, which took me back to 7th May 2001. I’m going to tell you what this ticket stub means to me. In 2001, I was a student at the University of Leicester . I was in my second year, and truth to tell, it wasn’t going all that well. I was doing an English degree, something which I wasn’t sure was really for me. With no options in the first year of the course, I was inevitably stuck with Shakespeare and minute line readings of The Good Soldier , when I wanted to be explaining to pink-chee...

Hi all I set myself a challenge today: could I come up with a horror story from nothing and get it posted before the end of Hallowe'en? The results are below. Read on if you dare! I Hear You Knocking I’ll see your flaming Buddhist, and raise you these pics from Tuol Sleng. Very grim. Drew’s pointer hovered over the upload option, as he mulled over whether this would put him ahead of the curve. This was Dark Night, after all. This was no time to be squeamish. He clicked it anyway, reasoning that even if he got called out for being dull, he hadn’t gone through his Cambodia folders for a while, and it had been nice to revisit old memories. The Khmer Rouge had given him some of his first cheap scares, and over the years he had added to the vacant, battered skulls and stacks of limb bones with some lesser-known delights: audio files, testimony and translated confessions from some of the two million. But he wasn’t giving those up without some serious leverage. Almost im...

Leo reached across the table to a paper cup full of wooden stirrers. His hand met long, slender fingers tipped with candy apple red. ‘Sorry,’ he blushed. ‘No problem,’ she said, her mouth widening into brilliant white. She patted his arm, running her hand down to his wrist, where her touch turned to electricity. ‘You’re new here. I spotted you when you walked in. You have a very sexy stride.’ She smiled again, placing her hand on her hip. ‘I’m Beatrice.’ There was an acute on the “a” in her name. This complemented the question-mark of her black cocktail dress. ‘Leo,’ he murmured, looking down at the floor. His trainers were scuffed and he could see the frayed hems of his jeans had been muddied by a hundred unnecessary journeys.m  They turned from the refreshments table and Leo looked around the room. Others were beginning to take their seats. None of them looked particularly friendly, but they all seemed wary of one another, as if one of them – nobody could tell who – w...

So, welcome back to my world. It’s debatable whether or not it’s better than the real world, but trust me, I wouldn’t have voted for him, so there’s that. People use the phrase “in a perfect world”, but it seems like 2016 was fuckin’ Nirvana compared to the shitshow this year is looking to be. Naturally, I’m back online to spread a little sunshine on proceedings, because my Smiths blog went really well (sample review: ‘you’re talking shit’). There are people better qualified and give a toss more than me about international politics. The Falklands Conflict was memorably described by Jorge Luis Borges as being “like two bald men fighting over a comb”, and the world has become a more spiteful and petulant place since the chilliest days of the Cold War. All I can say is that historically you don’t know you’ve lived through a crisis until you see it on a documentary. I watched some Channel 5 thing about 1990 the other day; turns out it was full of barricades, resignations and civil d...