"My Popularity was left dying in its final spasms"

Ok ... I'm juggling 2 books at the moment. My bedside read is Jasper Fforde's One of our Thursdays is missing - the latest in the Thursday Next series - literary agent extraordinaire!!. And my Train read is David Mitchell's Black Swan Green.

I'll get round to posting about my love affair with anything and everything that Jasper Fforde puts out, but its to Black Swan Green that I now turn my thoughts. The book centres round the adolescence of budding young poet, Jason Taylor, who like Mitchell himself, has a stammer. Its set in the 80s and the cultural and music references are so redolent of my own growing up, that it can be a difficult read for me at times.

But this morning in the train I reached a point in the narrative where Jason finally loses his tenuous position in the teenage hierarchy and is relegated to the position of "oily fuckin' maggot" ... back in the very doldrums of social activity. Over 2 pages and in about 6 paragraphs, Mitchell managed to scrunch my insides into a tight fisted ball of paper. The walls of the train dissappeared and I was back in a classroom somewhere, trying hard to keep breathing, eyes wide, head hot and heavy, someone has my schoolbag and is theatening to chuck it out a window, someone else accuses me of liking cock, all I can hear is laughter and then I just start to feel the whooshing air of someone's first punch but the change in lighting as the train hits the tunnel pulls me back in ... damn you David Mitchell ... love you David Mitchell!!