Playing for Time by Jeremy Lewis

Author:Jeremy Lewis [Jeremy Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571281152
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Such were the recollections that flashed through my mind as I lay in the enormous Edwardian bath, occasionally adding a dash of boiling water from one of the huge brass taps at its far end, and listening to the voices of the buggers uplifted in song. For another three years or so I would be immune from all that they embodied and were in training for – from an aggressive and competitive world in which the honours went to those who, from an early age, had learned to play the game and pull their weight and be members of a team, more than anxious to believe that what seemed to me – from a position that combined timidity, envy and a fatal, undermining sense of the fragility and the futility of most forms of human endeavour – to be matters of supreme indifference were, in fact, of serious and compelling importance. I was – and have remained – absurdly uncompetitive, and my scepticism and detachment manifested themselves in the kind of derisive commentary peculiar to those who see themselves as spectators rather than participants, and doubters rather than true believers; later on I was to learn that detachment can all too easily slide into evasion and escape, that jocularity has its limits, and that the rituals and forms and institutions I so disliked and derided had, after all, their virtuous as well as their vicious aspects. In the meantime, as I towelled myself down on the wooden duckboard and climbed into my green corduroy drainpipes and my wasp-waisted tweed jacket and combed my hair in front of the mirror on the white tiled wall and prepared to set out for Davy Byrne’s or the International Bar, I felt myself to be a wag of a particularly fortunate kind.

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