STRAIGHT OUT OF COPPULL

A collection of Lee Coppull's essays and short stories

Crofty!

Once I raided Croft's room and found a secret stash of stamps. I was surprised to learn  that none of you had known of his secret stamp fetish despite having known him for years. I was also fascinated and bemused by his very long assault on a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle bearing the image of two blue whales swimming under water.

I once saw a middle aged gent wrestle with Croft outside the Baron's Rest after he had spotted the reflection of Croft jumping up and down behind him in a shop window.

Never one to let a night finish early Croft once dragged several of us back to his parents' house despite his notoriously bad relationship with them. I can't remember the exact circumstances but I can remember that John disapeared into that little book cupboard off the living room with an unidentified female human. Croft pissed in a vase that was sat on the fireplace and eventually his mum came down to throw us out - I slept at Hod's House. What made me laugh was the way he responded to his mothers question - "What is going on?" by shrugging and laughing. We all shuffled out whilst she glared and Croft said "Don't go."!

Another time that I had the benifit of his parents' wisdom I had called for Croft and he had invited me to make us both a fried egg sandwich whilst he dashed off to get changed. Beard turned up as I was reaching critical point and asked the now characteristic "What's going on?" I shrugged which seemed to be what Croft did when asked this question. As I didn't know Beard too well I thought that all would be well when Croft returned and Beard realised that I was a guest of his son's rather than a random intruder.

This was not the case, same question to Croft, same shrug from Croft and then the killer line from an exasperated Beard "It's almost lunchtime!". We were 19.
 
 

Memories of Astley Park

Astley Hall is where I spent some time smoking magic fags with Mr Croft. We used to discuss the tramp that got murdered there. I used to go skateboarding in the paddling pool but it was always a bit dirty. Years previous to that I used to paddle in it. I once thought that I had seen a snake in there. When I was a young I wen't to Leyland Playscheme for two weeks in the summer. One day I elected to go on a mystery trip and ended up in Astley park. I've actually been in the hall which I have heard is unusual and I got told a story about a ghost that plays shuffleboard.

I once spent all day there flying a polystyrene glider with a certain young lady that I had recently pilfered from Hod. After that she aroused me so much by the lake that I stained my colourful bermuda shorts. I also recall sleeping there after seeing Nine Inch Nails at the International 2 on Plymouth Grove. We were effectively just at the bottom of Hod's garden but we still smoked cigs. Nobody had any food and nobody got any sleep really.
 

Exotic Shapes

Theorists have come up with a host of different shapes that couldcorrespond to a flat or hyperbolic finite universe. For instance, says Levin, a flat space can be built from repeating brick-shaped blocks, skewed rectangular blocks (parallelepipeds), or even hexagonal prisms that twistround by 120 degrees as light passes from one prism to the next. And thereare plenty of ways of designing a hyperbolic, finite Universe by tiling space with identical polyhedrons. Among them are regular icosahedrons(solids with 20 sides), and irregular polyhedrons with 18 sides. Each ofthe myriad shapes would scatter light from galaxies throughout space indifferent ways. Measuring the distribution of galactic images in the skywould reveal whether the Universe really does have one of these exoticshapes--or even something quite different.
 

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