Quotes from Stephen May

Good booze, good blues and nothing to do tomorrow. This is actually all anyone needs to be happy.

Work is a shit way to spend your time and everyone knows it.

Take it from me, local government offices are mostly about flexi-time and cake. Cake comes in for birthdays, for house moves, for news of engagements, births, weddings, christenings, driving tests, kids making the cross-country team or passing grade one piano. There is no news too small that it can't be celebrated with chocolate brownies for the whole office.

to be a high-school English teacher in modern Britain is to be a bad comedian in a hostile club. You have to deliver your terrible material six times a day to a crowd that would rather be somewhere else. And the heckling is vicious and it never ever stops.

Sindy is British and much more demure and well brought up than Barbie, who seems like a brash, oversexualised gold-digger if you ask me. The sort of girl who would marry a minor Rolling Stone. Even in her air-hostess uniform she looks like a hard-eyed little pole dancer.

At nineteen all proper adult ages are more or less the same. Thirty-seven, forty-five, sixty-two, a hundred and three. It hardly matters. They are all strange, faraway places you can't believe you'll ever visit.

Example 3. (T: Male Mandarin teacher in his late twenties. B1 and B2 boys about 13 years old; G1: a 12-year-old girl.) T: (Speaking slowly as he writes on the whiteboard) ?-?-? (bai wulong). Mess up. ?? (wulong), black dragon. ??? ???? Wulong Tea, do you know? Black Dragon tea. ?? (wulong)? means /mI ?eIp/.

Catherine long ago decided that grapefruit is the only proper breakfast juice. It is wake-up juice. Orange juice is acceptable as an alternative but really it's for the slack, for people who don't really want to wake up. As for those who like apple or cranberry juice in the morning, you just know they are weak. Masturbators and adulterers.

Americans and their orthodontistry, honestly, you'd think the right to a brilliant smile was enshrined in the constitution.