"A Question of Attraction" [.]

[fiefoe]

Student humor:

• "Reaction is equal and opposite to action," I say. Patrick's reaction is pretty equal and opposite too: a brief, begrudging raising of the eyebrows, before he goes back to his notepad.
• And, oh, God, there it is again, the suppressed memory, bubbling to the surface like a fart in a bath.
• that's my central problem with the Romantics; they're just not romantic enough. You imagine it's going to be a lot of love poetry that you can plagiarize in Valentine's cards, but generally speaking it's all about lakes and urns and leech collectors.
• In Brideshead Revisited, Charles's cousin warns him that your second term at university is generally spent avoiding all the undesirable people that you met in the first term.
• The four of them amble casually across the studio floor toward us in a long line, like gunslingers. They've all gone for the matching-blazer-and-tie look, and are all wearing college scarves and spectacles in a further attempt to intimidate us.

__ The paving slab seems undamaged, but one of the dumbbells is trundling heavily off toward Boots the Chemist like a tiny tank, and I have to lunge and stop it with my foot, which causes a certain amount of mirth amongst the young mums.
__ I wait for my breathing to stabilize, then pick the weights up, arms hanging baboonlike, and make little stooped runs along the street as if under machine-gun fire, for as long as my heart can take it.

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