There is a troubled bohemianism that melancholically attempts to recover an Arcadia which has been lost, knowing that this is futile. Slow Glass is a key film in this interpretation. '...When I look at the world now, it seems a long way away. I mean it never used to', utters the protagonist in his fine-tuned monologue on glass, DIY, his neighbours and life in general. He opines 'It's not the same, people are different, everything's different. I mean, nowadays, I don't think people know what the smell of linseed oil is like, what it's like to roll a bit of putty in you fingers'. This is a discourse of nostalgia, in the same way that the drunk in The Waste Land reciting Eliot in a pub toilet at the end of a long night is re-enacting Eliot's own sense of cultural loss, a nostalgia of longing. Smith ironically uses Eliot employing the vernacular ('Goodnight Bill'), while his drunk recites the high-art rhetoric of 'nymphs'. This is also a loss associated with the pastoral in which 'simple' characters (here Smith's drunk) are the purveyors of complex ideas (the drunk's recital of Shakespeare).