Girlfriend in a coma

Why won't they leave us alone? Everywhere you go, the fundies are trying to tell you the good news about Jesus, even when you are atop a mountain.

The sheer horror of this nefarious plot to bring the snowboarders to Christ is revealed in this passage:

Dan Ballard, the group's Wellington leader, said six to 10-minute chairlift rides were a good opportunity to bring up the topic of God while he had people's complete attention.

I expect by this stage you are thinking to yourself "what's with the headline" or "how is he going to bring a reference to The Smiths into the story this time?" Well no, you're wrong. Just for once, I wasn't thinking of The Smiths. I was thinking of Douglas Coupland's novel, Girlfriend in a Coma, in which something much more pleasant than evangelising happens in a chairlift.

Although it is funny you should mention The Smiths, since it is twenty-five years this month since Morrissey and Marr first met, as the Observer reminds us.

When I told my friend Aimèe that I had once seen The Smiths live, she hit me. When I added that I saw them at Rock City in Nottingham on the night before they made their first appearance on Top Of The Pops, she hit me again. I understood: As UNCUT magazine said of that performance of This Charming Man:

That Thursday evening when Manchester's feyest first appeared on TOTP would be an unexpected pivotal cultural event in the lives of a million serious English boys. His very English, camp glumness was a revolt into Sixties kitchen-sink greyness against the gaudiness of the Eighties New Pop World, as exemplified by Culture Club and their ilk. The Smiths' subject matter may have been 'squalid' but there was a purity of purpose about them that you messed with at your peril.