girlfriend in coma

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 Aim�e 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