I started to think of friends I could lean on for some help, but, as always happened when I attempted this kind of social audit, I realised that far too many of them were abroad,...

I once met an RAF pilot who told me of what he called a “bird strike”. This, rather unfairly in my view, made it sound as if it was the bird’s fault; as if the...

It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There’s almost no such thing as ready....

People talk about nightfall, or night falling, or dusk falling, and it’s never seemed right to me. Perhaps they once meant befalling. As in night befalls. As in night happens. Perhaps they, whoever they were,...

This was all horribly wrong. This was red wine with fish. This was a man wearing a dinner jacket and brown shoes. This was as wrong as things get.

…killing Dirk, killing anybody, was not going to change anything apart from Francisco’s f***ing ego, which was already large enough to house the world’s poor twice over, with a few million bourgeoisie in the spare-room.

I would cling to unhappiness because it was a known, familiar state. When I was happier, it was because I knew I was on my way back to misery. I’ve never been convinced that happiness...

I had too many things to say, and too small a brain to sort them out with.

I was shown into a room. A red room. Red wallpaper, red curtains, red carpet. They said it was a sitting-room, but I don’t know why they’d decided to confine its purpose just to sitting....

We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat cornflakes and sleep for a while,...

The sexual mechanisms of the two genders are just not compatible, that’s the horrible truth of it. (…)This is a truth we dare not acknowledge these days – because sameness is our religion and heretics...

It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a...