The boy had twisted fingers and sores on his legs and a battered face, flaky patches of scurf where hair was missing from his head.
Conditions, however uncomfortable, will generally be favorable to life of some sort, and the windless days and early heat had produced a plague of small black beetles that flew about blindly, getting tangled in wigs and snared in the corners of eyes, copulating and dying, leaving a scurf of corpses".
A thin scurf trying to keep the liquid from spilling out, but doing a poor job of it.
As for standouts, the rising and filtering-up synth lines, repeated builds and impressionistic vocals from Channy Leaneagh of Poliça on Little Fish should make it a live favourite; Shaker Obsession has an irresistible drive; and the lassitude, scurf and attitude of Sleaford Mods's Jason Williamson are the making of the unsettling Head and Shoulders.
I had cooked, sometimes, with difficulty, yet woke one day to find I had somehow assembled a bizarre array of crockery on my floor, like a gnomes' tea party but with much scurf; I daily grew too fatigued to lift things and spent increasing hours abed.
As a child in boarding school in the 1930s, everyone was ill all the time: we meet, matter-of-factly, sundry cuts and bruises, vomiting, constipation, colds and flu, scurf, bronchial pneumonia, warts, measles, perpetual nosebleeds, swollen glands, mumps and a heart murmur.
Soon enough, though, this narcotic phase was succeeded by excitation: spit balled in my mouth, my palms itched, my heartbeat accelerated – in my own small and unsophisticated way, staring at the algal scurf on the duck pond, I believed I could achieve something.
We must try to rub away all that itchy, distracting scurf of over-familiarity from our eyes.
The temptation to over-write, for a start: "a scurf of petals drifting idly along the bank" – an editor could have blue-pencilled that idle "idly".
Invisible to the naked eye monstrous in microscopy it loves the lovers' bed or couch pillow, quilt or duvet and feeds, thrives I should say on human scurf and dander indeed, is never happier than feasting on the dust of love's shucked husk the micro-detritus of us.
Because diagnostic scales and scurf, or small scales, are easily lost in the process of collecting and preparing herbarium specimens of the new species, the potential for confusion among related species is increased.
