conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit about David, British, Barwise with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In 1976, British college student David Barwise takes a job as a greencoat at a resort in a small coastal town on the North Sea. Along with an eccentric group of coworkers, he runs one daft entertainment after another, including judging the Glamorous Grandma competition and running the light show for the Italian tenor. David is having the time of his life, basking in the good cheer of vacationers hell-bent on enjoying their well-deserved break from the scruffy factories and the dirty coal mines of their industrial year. But David soon finds himself caught up in the politics of the National Front and in love with the wife of a menacing thug. Whats more, hes being haunted by visions of a man dressed in a blue suit who is holding the hand of a small, terrified child. The heat of a drought and an infestation of ladybugs only serve to heighten his sense of discomfiture. the author expertly captures a certain time and place, when family resorts were fading out and political extremism was on the rise, overlaying his snapshot with a subtle hint of the supernatural. --Joanne Wilkinson
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: --Joanne Wilkinson. the author expertly captures a certain time and place, when family resorts were fading out and political extremism was on the rise, overlaying his snapshot with a subtle hint of the supernatural. The heat of a drought and an infestation of ladybugs only serve to heighten his sense of discomfiture. Whats more, hes being haunted by visions of a man dressed in a blue suit who is holding the hand of a small, terrified child. But David soon finds himself caught up in the politics of the National Front and in love with the wife of a menacing thug. David is having the time of his life, basking in the good cheer of vacationers hell-bent on enjoying their well-deserved break from the scruffy factories and the dirty coal mines of their industrial year. Along with an eccentric group of coworkers, he runs one daft entertainment after another, including judging the Glamorous Grandma competition and running the light show for the Italian tenor.In 1976, British college student David Barwise takes a job as a greencoat at a resort in a small coastal town on the North Sea
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit
  It was 1976 and the hottest summer in living memory. The reservoirs were cracked and dry; some of the towns were restricted to water from standpipes; crops were failing in the fields. England was a country innocent of all such extremity. I was nineteen and had just finished my first year at college.
  But when I arrived in Skegness there wasn't a breath of wind, not even a sigh. The train rumbled in on hot iron tracks, decanted me and a few others onto the platform, and wheezed out again. The dirty Victorian red brick of the station seemed brittle, powdery. Flowers potted along the platform wilted and the grubby paintwork was cracked and peeled. I took a double-decker bus—mercifully open-topped—and asked the driver to drop me at the resort. He forgot and had to stop the bus and come up the stairs to tell me he'd passed it by. I had to backpack it a quarter of a mile, all in the shimmering heat. I followed the wire-mesh perimeter of the site with its neat rows of chalets and the seagull-like cries of the holidaymakers.
  I thought I might get a job as a kitchen porter or as a white-jacketed waiter bowling soup plates at the holidaymakers. Any job at all, just so long as I didn't have to go home. The manager in charge of recruitment—a dapper figure in a blue blazer and sporting a tiny pencil mustache—didn't seem too interested. He was preoccupied with sprinkling bread crumbs on the corner of his desk. As I waited to be interviewed a sparrow fluttered in through the open window, picked up a crumb in its beak, and flew out again.
  One of his eyebrows raised a notch. Encouraged, I added: "Actually I like children. And I can play a few chords. On the guitar."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She wasn't going to let me finish. "I could tell you things about my own life that would make your hair fall out. At least you know who your dad is—or you think you do. I've no idea, and yet you don't see me crying about it."
  Her irritation made me smile—or smirk, if that's what I was doing—even more. Heaven knows, I thought she was faking being cross with me, but I misread her mood. "That's it," she said with a nasty wheedle in her voice, "you can fuck off. You're not getting it tonight."
  She swallowed the last mouthful of beer and slung the bottle into the sea. I wanted to say something about children cutting their feet on broken glass, but I let it go. She was already up and folding the blanket. Without a word she set off ahead of me, moving toward the lights of the promenade.
  I DIDN'T SEE Terri the next day, but the following morning we almost collided in front of the theater. She behaved as if our spat hadn't happened. She'd been reassigned to clean in the theater again and that meant she'd been obliged to return her keys for the refurbished chalets. Our love nest was taken away from us and we had nowhere private to meet.
  She narrowed her eyes at me. I was afraid that she suspected I was withdrawing emotionally. I couldn't tell whether what I saw in her eyes was contempt or hurt. She could seem vulnerable one moment and then like cast iron the next. I weakened and we arranged to meet in my room at lunchtime.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She wasn't going to let me finish. "I could tell you things about my own life that would make your hair fall out. At least you know who your dad is—or you think you do. I've no idea, and yet you don't see me crying about it."
  Her irritation made me smile—or smirk, if that's what I was doing—even more. Heaven knows, I thought she was faking being cross with me, but I misread her mood. "That's it," she said with a nasty wheedle in her voice, "you can fuck off. You're not getting it tonight."
  She swallowed the last mouthful of beer and slung the bottle into the sea. I wanted to say something about children cutting their feet on broken glass, but I let it go. She was already up and folding the blanket. Without a word she set off ahead of me, moving toward the lights of the promenade.
  I DIDN'T SEE Terri the next day, but the following morning we almost collided in front of the theater. She behaved as if our spat hadn't happened. She'd been reassigned to clean in the theater again and that meant she'd been obliged to return her keys for the refurbished chalets. Our love nest was taken away from us and we had nowhere private to meet.
  She narrowed her eyes at me. I was afraid that she suspected I was withdrawing emotionally. I couldn't tell whether what I saw in her eyes was contempt or hurt. She could seem vulnerable one moment and then like cast iron the next.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: One night in April I was roused from sleep in the small hours by a tapping on the window. For a split second I thought it was going to be Colin, or perhaps the boy on the beach, all over again, because the boy never completely goes away. But it was only a friend, a fellow student who had locked himself out of his student lodge and wanted to sleep on our floor.
  Whether it's Madame Rosa, or her sister Dot in the steam laundry, or the mechanical fortune-teller on the pier, the advice comes down to the same thing: The future will be what we choose it to be, just so long as we carefully engineer the present. As for the past, it moves like sand under your feet. These things happened a long time ago yet remain luminous in my mind. As I write this I have resting on a pile of papers on my desk a glass paperweight. Scarlet with black spots, it is designed to look like a beautiful ladybug.
  The wonderful American writer Jeffrey Ford deserves a special mention for encouraging me to write this novel after I'd explained to him over a beer the colorful and almost incomprehensible institution of the British holiday center.
  Thanks and praise to my wife, Sue, who is my first reader and an indomitable critic, always rising far above my knitted brow and infernal mutterings.