case study

Syd Barrett (an artist)  —  image source

Illustrating the principle that most days it’s not worth not getting out of bed of a morning, artist Duggie Fields recounts the disintegration of his former flatmate Syd Barrett, who was a co-founding member of ‘legendary’ rock band Pink Floyd:

I think he spent quite a while lying in bed. I used to be in the next room and I’d be painting... And I knew he was lying in bed sort of thinking — my [speculative] interpretation was that he was thinking — that, while he lay there, he had the possibility of doing anything in the world that he chose. But the minute he made a choice, he was limiting his possibilities. So he lay there as long as he could — so he had this unlimited future! But, of course, that’s a very limited present, when you do that, and a very depressing one ultimately.

• interviewed for the film The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story (Otmoor Productions Limited, 2003)

Still, surely that kind of thing can’t hurt in moderation. So maybe next time you have a lie-in and arrive late for work, tell your employer it was imperative for you to maximise your possibilities. If you have a heartless philistine of a boss who just doesn’t get it, maybe it’s time to move on...?

Duggie Fields (an artist)  —  screencap by jarcob

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Me-too-ism confirmed

I’ve resisted commenting on the phenomenon that is ‘Party Boy’ Corey Worthington for a number of reasons. Prominent among those is that this young man lives locally to us.

In the main, however, the whole thing seemed to me very tiresome and ho-hum. His fame and/or notoriety seems equally based on his ‘legendary’ status among many of his peers, and the ‘parental’ feelings he seems to excite in newspaper letter writers, for example, many of whom devised a plethora of ways in which to punish him — for his own good, of course, if not for the greater good.

Now today I read this:

In a few notorious days, the 16-year-old become [sic] such a phenomenon that Googling him now produces more than 184,000 web results and more than 3000 blog references.

Well then, here’s one more for our local legend.

And an observation: The ‘Party Boy’ epithet just might stick...

Perhaps Mr Local Legend will fondly remember his youthful exploits when his carers at the nursing home tell him to stop being such a ‘Party Boy’ and take a nap — for his own good, the old ticker not being what it was.

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