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A barman who smiles

30rd December

Not only Manchester United can make the life better, but also a 2-hours-long chat with a foreigner in a local pub. This 40-years-old man is originally Norwegian. Follow his advice and visit: www.top10inthecity.com

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True feelings

24th-30rd December

Put aside the book about drugs, but not the whole theme isn't really put off. Here is a example of how much harm can drugs do. From the firm friendship and high hopes to deeply disstressed lives.

For me and Pete, it wasn’t too different from falling in love. It’s grotesque now. I said to him, ‘heroin and crack are bigger than you, mate. You’ll die or live the rest of your life like Gollum.’ But Pete never wanted to listen. And then the tragedy began.



Notoriously hedonistic rock star Pete Doherty and old Libertines band-mate Carl Barat.

Right now, if Pete walked in, I’d like just to sit down and have a normal conversation with him, and not have to talk about the Libertines and all the other messy stuff. But I suppose that’s impossible now.
It’s a long time since anything has been normal in Pete’s life. It’s a complete horror show.
‘It stopped being about rock ’n’ roll ages ago. It’s about newspaper headlines, and he’s good at that game. Pete is very good at knowing just how much to give away and how to push the boundaries. Or at least he thinks he’s good at it. Maybe he doesn’t realise that the most dangerous part of that game is that if you’re not careful the people you think you’re playing are going to own you. Maybe he’s at that stage already.’
It’s been more than three years since Carl Barat and Pete Doherty disbanded the Libertines and went their separate ways. At the time of the split, the smart money was on Doherty to emerge as the greater star. While Doherty has become more renowned for his hell raising antics and his arrests, it’s Barat who has distinguished himself musically, with Dirty Pretty Things now accepted as one of the most vital bands of this era. With Barat on lead vocals and guitar, their emotive buzz saw rock ’n’ roll is both critically acclaimed and commercially thriving. Indeed, the new album Romance At Short Notice has been among 2008’s most eagerly anticipated releases.

Barat pauses, takes a sip of his beer, then continues.

‘You can’t give Pete advice. I’ve been through all that many times before. We were in Paris writing the second Libertines album, and I said to him, “Heroin and crack are bigger than you, mate – much bigger. If you carry on with those drugs, they’ll write their own story. Because that’s what those drugs do. If you keep doing them, there are only two scenarios. Either you’ll die or you’ll live the rest of your life like Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings.” Quite often I’d try to shock him by saying things like that. But Pete never wanted to listen.
‘You have to understand that this is someone I care a lot about. There’s still a lot of love between me and Pete. At least there is from my side. So when I pick up a newspaper and read the latest instalment in his life, it makes me sad and angry. I’m relieved that I’m not part of that grotesque merry-go-round. But I wish Pete wasn’t a part of it either.

‘Pete always knew he was going to be famous. It was the only thing that was going to happen to him. When it came, he revelled in it. Now he’s maybe settled for being famous for being famous. It’s stopped being about the music. It’s about the mayhem. There’s something really tragic about that.’

Barat has the demeanour of a young man who has lost the most important thing in his world.

By the conclusion of our conversations, during which love and loss are mentioned as often as Doherty’s name, it’s quite clear he has done precisely that. Each time we meet he sports the same uniform, which doubles as his stage apparel: scruffy jeans, distressed T-shirt and leather jacket. He retains the look of a glamorous poetic waster, which has been his trademark since the early days with Doherty – together they were the Byronic Romantics of grunge pop.

He talks in a low, almost apologetic mumble and his eyes are tired. He tells me that in the next 24 hours he will turn 30.

He looks a whole lot better than Doherty, which obviously isn’t saying much. He’s been without sleep or food for more than 72 hours, fuelled by ‘Jameson whiskey and, y’know, other stuff’. Catching his reflection in a mirror, he winces rather theatrically and says, ‘My body is in ruins.’


Despite this assertion, and the occasional joke about needing to curb his party excesses, it still comes as a shock when, a week later, Barat is rushed to hospital suffering from vomiting, nausea and severe stomach pains. Diagnosed with acute pancreatitis, he’s kept under observation for six days, undergoes further tests and is put on a morphine drip. Early indications are he’ll be unable to drink ever again.

Though Barat and Doherty communicate regularly by text, it’s now more than 12 months since they last met, reuniting to record a cover of the Beatles’ A Day In The Life for Radio 2’s 40th-anniversary celebration of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Two months prior to that, Barat had joined Doherty on stage at London’s Hackney Empire for a 13-song set that included a clutch of Libertines songs.
‘I don’t cry too easily, and hardly ever in public. But there were a lot of tears at that gig. Emotionally it was colossal. It was the first time I’d played with Pete for ages without Kate Moss and the whole entourage around. It reminded me how great we were together and how much unfinished business there is.
‘As to whether the Libertines could reform, that’s a big maybe. It’s a question that follows me around constantly. I’ll be out getting a loaf of bread and some aggressive schoolkid will come up and ask, “When are you getting the Libertines back together?” I deal with it politely, but I’m thinking, “Do you really think this is something I haven’t given a lot of thought to?”’

Barat emerged with Dirty Pretty Things in September 2005, with bassist Didz Hammond, guitarist Anthony Rossomando and former Libertines drummer Gary Powell. Their debut album, Waterloo To Anywhere, sold 120,000 copies.
Its punky guitar rock bore only a passing resemblance to the output of Barat’s former band, but at least some of the spite and anger in the lyrics (‘You’re a legend in your mind/but a rumour in your room’) seemed to be aimed squarely at Doherty.



‘I didn’t kid myself that I could start with a clean slate. To some extent we were working in the shadow of the Libertines, the shadow of Pete Doherty. It was a really hard time for me; I was feeling dark and miserable. I suppose I blamed myself for everything that had gone wrong before. But I didn’t want to change either. It was almost as if I felt I had to feel miserable and guilty to carry on writing songs.’

Barat tells me that depression has dogged him for as long as he can remember. ‘I’ve never known true happiness or peace of mind,’ he says bleakly. ‘I’ve always been something of a troubled soul. Growing up, I had a constant feeling of “this is not my world”.’

Barat was born in Basingstoke, and spent his early years alternately with his father, who worked in an armaments factory, and his mother, a hippy who finally settled in a commune in Somerset.
‘I was never much into music as a kid,’ he says. ‘But I drifted into it. In my early teens I’d hang around with my mates getting stoned, strumming the same guitar chord over and over. It took me years just to master the basics, but I always had a strange belief that music would be my life.’As a teenager he worked his way through a series of very odd jobs. ‘I did a stint on the front desk of a place where schizophrenics went if they’d missed their injections. I did the night shift in a salad factory. I was one of the tossers. My job involved tossing salad all night, removing dead or dying animals from the lettuce. The highlight for me was discovering half a frog. We never found the other half.’ He was studying drama at Brunel University when he befriended Pete Doherty’s older sister. By now Barat had been doing pub gigs for a couple of years, and Doherty got in touch, hoping to be taught how to play guitar. The most important relationship in Barat’s life was born.

‘Even from the start we fought. There was always a spark. Pete had all the front and I was very shy. Pete craved chaos and I longed for security.



Eventually that combination is going to become volatile. Something like that is always going to implode. It’s just a matter of time. Only we didn’t realise it at the time.’

Barat and Doherty moved into a squalid basement flat in Camden and plotted their course. The Libertines, they decided, would be no ordinary rock group, but a force that would overthrow the musical establishment and break down the barriers between artist and audience. Their line-up completed with drummer Powell and bassist John Hassall, they began playing live wherever they could – a condemned pub, a disused factory, even a north London brothel – and quickly built up a devoted following.

‘It was either the top of the world or the bottom of the canal. It wasn’t too different from falling madly in love; when you don’t even entertain the thought that it could ever end. At the start it was fun. I’d always wanted to be part of a gang. I was part of a gang of cheeky urchins who felt they could take on the world. Then heroin entered the picture…’
It was during the making of the Libertines’ debut album in the summer of 2002 that trouble first reared its (ugly) head. Doherty suddenly went AWOL, forcing the band to play a gig without him. By September, with their second single Up The Bracket giving them a chart hit, it was clear that Doherty’s increasing unreliability was linked to his flirtations with heroin and crack cocaine.

‘The Libertines had become my whole world, and I suppose Pete was the mate I’d always wanted.

‘Being in a band and getting messed up in order to have a good time, that’s one thing. Then there’s the kind of trouble that drugs like heroin and crack bring to the party. I didn’t want that life. It didn’t appeal to me on any level. The bottom line is that it’s boring being a junkie ****-up. It probably makes for a great read if you’re not involved. Up to a point the chaos of the Libertines was enjoyable for me. Then very sinister agendas took over and it became the opposite of fun.’

Following the release of the debut album, Barat opted to take a ‘tough love’ approach with Doherty, refusing to let him record or perform with the band until he’d completely cleaned up. Doherty, his addictions now out of control, refused to take the bait. In the summer of 2003, while the band were playing dates in Japan, he burgled Barat’s London flat, making off with, among other things, a prized antique guitar. He duly served two months in prison. Upon his release, Barat was there to welcome him with open arms, and they started work on a second album. However, by the time the band reached the recording studio, their management had assigned each member a security guard in order to stop them from fighting. During this period, with active encouragement from Barat, Doherty made three attempts at rehab, including a short-lived stint at a Thai monastery. He left after three days, heading to a Bangkok hotel where heroin was conveniently available via room service.

‘By this point Pete had become an unstoppable train,’ says Barat. ‘Looking back, there’s nothing I could have done. I’d tried everything. I’d worked pretty damn valiantly to hold him together, to the point of complete exhaustion. The dream of the Libertines was my destiny, and I fought tooth and nail to keep it together.


Even when it was a hopeless cause, it took every ounce of strength I had to pull away from it. Pete’s life had been consumed by drugs and, if that wasn’t heartbreaking enough, I also had to sacrifice the band. On a personal level, it was nothing less than devastating. It should never have come to such a tawdry end.’
On the face of it, Barat has mastered the seemingly impossible art of living in the long shadow of the Libertines. He’s in a successful, long-term relationship with DJ girlfriend Annalisa Astarita, with whom he shares a home in Muswell Hill, north London.
Against the odds, he’s survived the wreckage of the Libertines and created his own successful band. We came very close to breaking up during the making of this album. A reshuffle of members was definitely on the cards at some point – it came perilously close to sackings. There have been a few fist-fights. In that way, Dirty Pretty Things is as intense as life in the Libertines. It’s still do or die for me.’

Barat rolls up his sleeve to show me the ‘Libertine’ tattoo on his right bicep. ‘You’d be amazed how many people come up to me and show me their own copy of this,’ he says. ‘It’s touching that people remember the band for something more than the drugs and the fighting. That they still believe in the music. It reminds me that I believe in everything that I believed in when I was in the Libertines.


I miss the purity of what me and Pete had together when we started out. It would be great to have that back. Pete always used to say, “Imagine the songs we still have to write.” That thought is always with me.’



More vocabulary: distressed-formal-having very little money: in distressed circumstances

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Addiction

24th-29th December

Here comes my list of vocabulary I have started to poses from  The Undefeated by Irvine Welsh.

Leer – look at smb and show they are sexually attractive


Stop off - make a short visit to a place during a journey, especially to rest or to see someone.

Pluck up (the) courage (to do something) - force yourself to be brave and do something you are afraid of doing.

Cathartic -helping you to remove strong or violent emotions: a cathartic experience.

Lined face – with wrinkles

A sound argument – strong

Break off – stop talking

Bother

Fuse – combine different ideas etc

Cast an eye on/over something - examine or read something quickly in order to judge whether it is correct, good etc.

Make somebody's acquaintance - meet someone for the first time: I should be delighted to make Mrs McGough's acquaintance. At the hotel, I made the acquaintance of a young American actor.

Apologetic - showing or saying that you are sorry that something has happened, especially because you feel guilty or embarrassed about it. The manager was very apologetic about everything. She gave me an apologetic smile. Look/sound apologetic. I know,' she said apologetically.

Necessitate - make it necessary for you to do something: Lack of money necessitated a change of plan. necessitate doing something

Proximity - nearness in distance or time + to/of

Relinquish – give up smth to smth

Get out of something - avoid doing something you have promised to do or are supposed to do: See if you can get out of that meeting tomorrow. get out of doing something. -2- Stop doing something or being involved in something: I wanted to get out of teaching.

Thrive - become very successful or very strong and healthy

Reconcile - if you reconcile two ideas, situations, or facts, you find a way in which they can both be true or acceptable: The possibility remains that the two theories may be reconciled.

Perceive

Uneventful

Combative – ready to argue

Tense

Resentment - a feeling of anger because you feel that you are being treated badly or unfairly, and cannot do anything about it: Patricia stared at the other girls with resentment.

Load - the amount of work that a person or machine has to do: The computer couldn't handle the load and crashed. My work load has doubled since Henry left. They hired more staff in order to spread the load.

Slumber=sleep

Contempt – презрение. The contempt he felt for his students was obvious. The report shows utter contempt for women's judgement.

• His ideas have won widespread public approval (=many people agree with them and think they are good).

Does the design meet with your approval (=do you like it?)? She looked to Greg for approval.

Take responsibility for

• The government's proposals were held up to ridicule by opposition ministers. He had become an object of ridicule among the other teachers.

Whatsoever - used to emphasize a negative statement: He's had no luck whatsoever.

среда

From the new angle

23rd December

According to Design & Life and other publications Taichung Conversation Center-an amazing architectual essemble-was designed to personify the strenght and aspirations of  modern China.


Look for more desing here





Wizard

23rd December

From what I heard:

be a matter of principle - be something that you feel you must or must not do, because of your moral principles.

See how differently is the word MATTER used. http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/matter_1

On the basis

Go along - if you do something as you go along, you do it without planning or preparing it.
He was making the story up as he went along. Or: I never had formal training, I just learned the job as I went along.

Be valid for smth.

Somebody, who is good at something, can be called a wizard. A financial wizard; a wizard at chess.

Turned to reading:


You may not know this lanky lass from Littleborough, England, her by her birth name—Laura Hollins—but you're sure to know the blonde-haired, blue-eyed stunner's supermodel moniker: Agyness Deyn. While she won her first modeling contest at age thirteen, the bona fide It Brit put off modeling until she was discovered on the streets of London and urged by friends, including roommate and childhood pal, Henry Holland, to walk the catwalk full-time. Soon after signing to an agency 2006, Deyn was shipped off to New York to walk such in-demand runways as Marc by Marc Jacobs, Proenza Schouler, and Zac Posen.


Yet it's Deyn's unparalleled style sense—her peroxide-blonde pixie cut and wild wardrobe—that could gain the face of Burberry's The Beat perfume a spot among other iconic mannequins like Twiggy and Kate Moss in the fashion industry's Hall of Fame. After all, Deyn was named "Model of the Year" in 2007 by the British Fashion Awards as well as tapped as one of the world's next supermodels by Vogue on the cover of their May 2007 issue, making this model a surefire fashion legend in the making.

Clues:
new, no much attention
new, to remember
mention the structure, expression

воскресенье

Return

My writing is back! For this I have several reasons: *train my language,*structure my learning process,*recall everything I have forgotten.

Today in the morning I tried some IELTS-exam. A task required my monologue about the video clip I have seen recently. Lady GAGA Bad Romance was my choice. I found it difficult to explain what particulary do I like about it. What a shame!

Look here to see how an English referee is praised by the Liverpool manager:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/dec/20/liverpool-rafael-benitez-portsmouth
"I have seen the replay and for me it is not a sending-off, but anyway the referee was perfect. He didn't make any mistakes".(Rafael Benitez)