Albert, Albert Camus, everyone knows his name

Sitting on the windowsill with a copy of L'Etranger in my hand, half in, half out of my Susans Road flat watching the local boys returning from their football match...

Life as Sussexistentialist was wonderful. They were sweet, confusing but heady days.. The soundtrack was the MJQ and the guidebook was written by the former goalkeeper and Gitanes smoking French author Albert Camus. His novel L'Etranger (or The Outsider as it was roughly translated) re-calibrated the way I looked at the world. The simple act of lighting a cigarette, talking to a beautiful girl, making a meal for one and staring out at the traffic was now beyond the mundane. These were the actions of a man on the edge of society...

From the very beginning when Mersault (the hero of the novel) learns of his mothers death, through to the very end on the eve of is own death. He glides and skims through life, death, sex, drunkeness, arrest and being condemned to state execution, the sheer weight of the sun bleaching out the more mundane emotions and reactions of 'normal' people. 

All of which made life on the South Coast somehow far more bearable, knowing that others had felt the same way before.