For Those in Need of Cheering Up

DO you sometimes feel you are the most overeducated, useless person on the planet? Do you fear you are too intellectual to sustain an everyday conversation without drifting off to the problem of transubstantiation or Foucauldian anecdotes? Do you suffer from 'the lonesome Oxbridge blues'? Then I suggest you go and read the personal ads in 'The London Review of Books'. You’ll feel redeemed and charmingly reassured of your own averageness.

A little sample:

'The song that most puts me in the mood for love is Rick Dee’s Disco Duck. Woman, 54, clinging desperately to the erotic undertones of a 1976 historical society Christmas party chance dancefloor encounter.'

'Previoulsy affable, now largely intolerant and recently divorced woman (34) WLTM a bloke my age who doesn’t spend 15 hours a day pretending he’s a heroic blacksmith killing stuff in some other-dimensional village resembling Cottingley circa 1902. Talk to me, not Olaf the Destroyer.'

And my personal favourite:

'I am not as high maintenance as my highly polished and impeccably arranged collection of porcelain cats suggests, but if you touch them I will kill you. F, 36. Likes porcelain cats.'

Tokyo Landscape II

This is the NOA building in Azabudai, shot through a cab window. With its red brick base and lip stick shape it is a peculiar appearance in the jumbled faceless cityscape of Tokyo. It was designed by Shirai Seiichi in1974 and has in my opinion grown old rather more gracefully than many a postmodern concoction.

Tokyo Landscape I

This is one of the buildings next to Shinjuku station no one ever notices. But on second glance it is actually quite interesting in a 60's sort of way. Could be a villain's headquarter in an early James Bond film.