I wish I could track it down because no single object played a greater part in determining my future life than that album. It undoubtedly helped me get a grade 1 at O-level … but it was also like a sample from an ocean of language and literature stored and waiting for me in the paddling pool of my stereo. School work began to change from something

Uprooted from the place and life he knew he made an accommodation with his new circumstances by simultaneously finding fault with them and retrospectively upgrading the quality of life he'd left behind.

How low her expectations of herself, her sense of self-worth, must have been not even to have attempted this. Her sense of life was that everything universally granted to everyone else was beyond her.

The record player was, by definition, the thing on which records were played but it was also an insidious portal to a world of unrestrained expense. Long before the term 'mission creep' entered military parlance my dad had an unerring eye for what might be called purchase creep.