All the world
When you are on stage the trick is to make it look like you are not acting, you haven’t rehearsed, and your part comes naturally. Same in life.
literature
Other people’s shoes
Reading a biography gives you the spurious feeling of life as being structured, ordered, logical, rational. Unlike, of course, your own life filled with chance, happenstance, chaos, randomness.
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Oh, all right, just a peek, now and then
When you are born you should be presented with a 70-year-diary, every day already filled in, a bright red ribbon tied around the cover. Then, as you work your way through life, you could constantly check where you were up to and what lay ahead. Or perhaps it would be best to leave it closed,
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Eye of the storm
My childhood home had a “lounge room”, a room in the centre of the house almost never used, but with the best furniture, rarely sat upon, the piano, not played, fallen silent, since my grandfather died, too young, too young, and the record player. It was, in theory, the place where important visitors could be
Memories are made of this
Proust’s taste of a madeleine catapulted him to the memory of a time and place. We all have our madeleine moments. Perhaps, like Proust, the taste of a cake, or of fish and chips, or of a certain flavour of soda drink. Not just tastes though – smells: of a wood fire, or sun lotion,
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Time’s Up
Life is like an exam in which you struggle to write as much as possible, pack as much into each answer as possible, until the moment when the teacher says “Time’s Up”, and you stop, reluctantly, seeing, on the exam paper, gaps where you could have, should have, said more, places where, gulp, you have
Scavengers
Religion and Fascism are constantly being retrieved from the dustbin by people who know they can make good use of them.
Stop all the clocks
My grandfather’s fob watch, a present from his father, ticked away all the years and events of the first half of the twentieth century – marriages and births and deaths and wars and emigration and illness and disappointment and much joy. But since he died, in 1953, of a horrible illness, a young man of
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