Talking Soup Talks: #1 The University Experience

In a new series of interviews and reviews, the editorial team at Talking Soup kick off a new series of podcasts. In this pilot episode our digital editor, John Smith, takes a look at the issues surrounding students in a time of the Covid-19 pandemic. Should they stay or should they go? If you want to take part in the podcast, then please get in touch.
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Rewarding

Nick Sweeney returns to Talking Soup to bring us a story of a job working with disabled children. Fundraisers, misunderstanding, unbearable ignorance and the misuse of the word ‘rewarding’, ring any bells fo anyone?
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ANGER

‘To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time — and in one’s work. And part of the rage is this: It isn’t only what is happening to you. But it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance’ – James Baldwin.
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How Black Was My Thumb?

I finish my £8.30 pint and head for where I used to live. Why? I’ve started writing now, I might as well go. It’s an ex-council block. East London thick brick. Rubicon cans on the stairwell, faulty lifts. A kid called Abdi that tries to sell you weed every time you see him, even though you tell him that you don’t smoke weed. It was him that I thought I saw walking past the pub. He’s got a dog. He told me that it is was rare for a Bengali to have a dog. I wonder if he’s still here?
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Storm the Palace and Louis Rive talk about music

I guess they’re the kind of lyrics most songwriters would use as a place-holder before coming up with something more universal and generic. Apparently the Beatles song ‘Yesterday’ was originally about bacon and eggs, but obviously McCartney decided to change the words to something more commercially viable. Thankfully commercial viability isn’t something I need to worry about. And for me, at least, I still find the lyrics quite meaningful as they are.
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The Hangover

I sit up in bed with my hand over my eyes. The shards of sunlight, shining through the open window and the scream of a scooter from the street below make me wince. Through my fingers the black and white poster of the singer Morrissey looks down on me with pity from the bedroom wall. I return the look with remorse and regret.
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The Beautiful Game

We stood on the terrace, a paltry sprinkling of crowd awaiting a corner. Those whom we had come to see stood at arms’ length, the accentuated shouts, the frenetic panting and the smell of turf and bloke as vivid in my mind now as it was a solid 20 years ago.

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Burden

I have killed her in my head more times than I can count. I have attended her funeral. I have wept on her grave. I have cried alone in a room littered with pill bottles and years of filth because I wasn’t there to save her. Every unknown number from Connecticut is her final plea for forgiveness before she swallows the pills or slices the blade across pale blue-veined wrists. I am a bad son. I let her do this. It is all my fault.

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The Strange Case of Derick Johnson

For some reason, my first instinct was to assume that Derick Johnson was a figment of Nick’s imagination or a sort of creative in-joke between some of the players. The name, I observed, sounded like a character from Mad Men. I imagined a dapper fellow in his mid-thirties turning up to play, with a short glass of scotch on the rocks in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

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Show Me Your Teeth

Mouth open as he presses cold metal against each tooth. Leaning over me, he recites codes I don’t understand to his assistant. When it’s over, he smiles and tells me, to my surprise, that I have good teeth. Good, straight teeth. It means more to me than it should. I tell myself he says that to all his patients. Within reason.
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