LISTS

aka "I don't want to write my essay"

  • alphabetising
  • re-reading your old tweets
  • picking labels off things. see also: peeling fruit in one piece
  • idly considering whether old shoes would be viable if they were cleaned
  • internal parts of the coffee machine definitely need polishing
  • sweeping and mopping floors
  • giving the dog a bath
  • suddenly conceiving of a desire to go to the seaside
  • going to the GP in order to scale an investigative campaign into why your knee is doing this weird clicking thing
  • breaking up with your boyfriend
  • eating questionable food items in order to instigate a bout of salmonella, thereby giving yourself "a bit of a breather"

A selection of things described by The Guardian as "iconic" in a heady fortnight in 2010:

  • Archaeopteryx
  • bluefin tuna
  • Castro's cigar
  • David Beckham wearing an anti-Glazer scarf
  • Grace Kelly in casual wear
  • Imperial War Museum
  • Nigel Slater
  • Mad Men
  • Variety
  • the John Hughes films Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Weird Science
  • Shepard Fairey's Obama Hope design
  • the Parliamentary constituency of Hove
  • Brandenburg Gate
  • Bach's St Matthew Passiona community-owned wind turbine
  • Kraft cheese slices
  • salmon farming
  • the blue and white stripes of Cornishware pottery
  • Penarth Pavilion, Cardiff
  • the Norwegian church and Pierhead Building in Cardiff Bay
  • a multimillion-pound arena in Leeds
  • a "rock-built engine house at Bottalack near St Just"
  • the Royal Albert Hall wind turbines ("iconic renewable energy technology")
  • Wembley Arena
  • the video for Kylie Minogue's Can't Get You Out Of My Head

via @stephharmon on twitter | The Guardian Style Guide

  • Pea Puree
  • Peach Sorbet
  • Pepto Bismol
  • Schiaparelli Pink
  • Tequila Sunrise
  • Arsenic
  • Custard
  • Mustard
  • Orange sherbert
  • Fake mint
  • Periwinkle
  • Wordart purple

  • ["you really are a common little] arriviste" | status-seeker, social-climber, would-be
  • etiolated | pale and drawn due to a lack of light, feeble
  • antediluvian | old-fashioned, belonging to a time pre biblical flood
  • "Corryvreckan [alchemy of the paintbox]" | a narrow strait between Scottish isles Jura and Scarba which features a great whirlpool, standing waves, and a lot of "surface effects". The Scottish goddess of winter was said to wash tartan in the strait which turned it so white it became a blanket of snow to cover the mountains.
  • logorrhoeic | excessive talkativeness, literally: a flow of words.
  • [a blue whale's] cochlea | a small snail shell-shaped chamber of the inner ear that receives sound in the form of vibrations
  • a pre-Columbian kern stone | ??? still not sure. perhaps a stone carving originating from historical civilisations prior to Christopher Columbus' voyage of 1492
  • "a small dinosaur's coprolite poo" | fossilized faeces, literally: dungstone
  • proselytiser/proselytising | attempting to persuade [someone] from one religion/belief/opinion to another
  • Gadarene | involved in a potentially disastrous rush to do something, with reference to the biblical tale of a herd of swine running down a mountain into the sea.
  • plosive | a "stop" consonant (eg. T) although in this case, more like a metaphorical cork for diarrhoea.
  • vitrined | like a vitrine: a glass case full of curios. How Gill describes one half of his brain that won't let him leave a rhetorical trivial-based question unanswered.

(three of these solvable mysteries are things AA Gill actually owned in his own vitrine)

  • Really bad smells. Especially: unwashed, sweaty human bodies, old stale sweat, clothes that have been wet in the washing machine for too long
  • Over-designed, inefficient items that don't work and feel somehow audacious in their claim of being special. This morning a heavy-handled, too-long knife that slithered and clattered backwards off every plate it was rested on incensed me.
  • When someone can't hear what you're saying on the phone, especially if you have launched into a lengthy (but brilliant) diatribe. Being required to repeat yourself endlessly to absolutely no avail.
  • When parts of my body ache inexplicably, or don't work, or feel faulty
  • Unanswered phones/car alarms
  • flashers
  • gropers
  • Dropping things/breaking things/knocking things over, especially if in sequence
  • People who can't give you more than 1 second at a green light
  • Inefficient lightbulbs, unflattering light generally. single spotlight over the sink in a bathroom, so that in order to look in the mirror you have to back up halfway across the room.
  • Parade-pissing/negging
  • Plans changing/being ghosted/cancelled/ignored

  • Two boys playing badminton over a tractor tyre, in a gorge.
  • Woman thwacking wet clothes against a rock in the river.
  • Lots of enormous, filthy, gurning cows, looking like the entire stock of a leather merchant’s. All rippling, glistening swathes of skin, caked in mud and straw.
  • A monkey in a ravine with a stick.
  • Crumpled jackfruits hanging from the trees like psychedelic wasps nests.
  • Monk’s temple with 50 painted concrete monk statues in orange robes processing in a queue along the outside wall.
  • Clean clothes drying in the sun laid out on rocks around the base of a waterfall, looking like a melted crime scene.
  • 40 matching pink and purple striped sarongs fluttering on a washing line.
  • Very insistent blind woman asking to be led onto our train by a hesitant, responsibility-shy passer-by, only for it to leave the platform without her.
  • An enormous palindromic fallen tree trunk lying across a gorge. Branches looking identical to its roots.
  • 2 cows with 2 ducks (one each) at opposite ends of a paddock, as if they were gangs enacting farmyard West Side Story.
  • Man standing on top of a hedge wearing a polo neck.
  • An amazing plant covered in silky rhubarb and custard upside down trumpets, or, what could otherwise be hundreds of tiny ballet costumes hanging from its branches. (Update from imaginatively named plants dept: I have since learned this is called Angel Trumpet flower)
  • Orange chair on a green tin roof
  • Man standing on a petrol tanker, hand on hip, looking sassy.
  • 3 blokes sitting in pole positions, on the top of a set of stone steps, at the top of a huge hill, waving at us.
  • Dog eating scrambled eggs out of a tin foil platter on a doorstep
  • Patchwork tin roof made of a panoply of sheets of metal all in varying shades of mud and rust – looking like an ikat bedspread
  • Two pairs of trousers drying side by side on a hedge
  • Small boy washing a small dog in a small brook
  • Barriers running alongside between train track and neighbouring village made out of saris