and even though I hardly know her, I am in tears at the pitifully wizened figure giving a salute of good luck, all life spent, with nothing remaining but the brusque knock of a stranger intruding with instructions of where to go, how to sit, and how to die.

There is only ever a sense of change and of slipping away, but never a sense of security or stability.

Catholicism has you tracked and trailed for life with an overwhelming sense of self-doubt, and every church churns with painful pews and mourners’ stalls.

All Manchester boys are mad, and they shout, and they laugh loudly, and courtship is a question of aggression rather than gallantry.

Where are there such boys who are fully and entirely content with simply being?

We watch in order to find ecstasy, for at last we can survive in someone else. Our conclusions are our own, yet the landscape is infinite.

Television is the only place where we banish ourselves from the community of the living, and where the superficial provides more virtue than the actual.

my heart sinks down into a new darkness. There is nothing I can salvage from this accusation, and the eyes pool, as I lose.

It was he who told me the reason why girls fluttered around me at St Wilfrid’s, and what it was that they wanted. He told me this because I didn’t know, and even when I knew, I was less interested than when I didn’t know.