A human hand was exactly the right weight, exactly the right temperature for touching another person, I realized. I’d shaken hands a fair bit over the years—more so recently—but I hadn’t been touched...
You're a bit bonkers-but in a good way. You make me laugh...you don't give a ____ about any of the stupid stuff...you just do your own thing, don't you?
I'd worked out that social success is often built on pretending just a little. Popular people sometimes have to laugh at things they don't find very funny, do things they don't particularly want to, w...
Purchased my laptop. It was 5:20 p.m., and the store would close in less than an hour. Womenswear was on the first floor (when did Ladieswear become Womenswear? I wondered) and I took the escalator, b...
Intervene. He’d elected to look after me himself. I’d been pondering this, and concluded that there must be some people for whom difficult behaviour wasn’t a reason to end their relationship with you.
[…] La soledad está marcada por el intento de llevar a término la experiencia; algo que no puede conseguirse solo con fuerza de voluntad o saliendo más, sino desarrollando vínculos íntimos. Es mucho m...
When did people become embarrassed to sing in public? Was it because of the decline in churchgoing? And yet the television schedule was full of singing contests in which people, however untalented, we...
When I answered the door, he was holding a bottle of Irn-Bru and a bag of jelly babies.
There was, it seemed, no Eleanor-shaped social hole for me to slot
The crematorium was a busy place and the parking spaces were needed, I supposed. I’m not sure I’d like to be burned. I think I might like to be fed to zoo animals. It would be both environmentally fri...
She looked at him with so much love that I had to turn away. At least I know what love looks like, I told myself. That's something. No one had ever looked at me like that, but I'd be able to recognize...
Nine years, and you've never had a day off sick, never used all your annual leave. That's dedication, you know. It's not easy to find these days.It's not dedication, I said. I simply have a very robus...
My phone doesn’t ring often—it makes me jump when it does—and it’s usually people asking if I’ve been mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance. I whisper I know where you live to them, and hang up the ph...
Mummy’s a bad person,’ I said. ‘Really bad. I know that, I’ve always known that. And I wondered … do you think I might be bad too? People inherit all sorts of things from their parents, don’t they – v...
I’m familiar with the concept of bacchanalia and Dionysian revels, of course, but it strikes me as utterly bizarre that women should want to spend an evening together drinking and purchasing such item...
It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thi...
In the end, what matters is this: I survived. I gave him a very small smile. I survived, Raymond! I said, knowing that I was both lucky and unlucky, and grateful for it.
In most professions, getting older means getting better at your job, earning respect because of your seniority and experience. If your job depends on your looks, the opposite is true—how depressing. S...
If often feels as if I'm not here, that I'm a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thi...
I was in a fast-food restaurant for the first time in my adult life, an enormous and garish place just around the corner from the music venue. It was mystifyingly, inexplicably busy. I wondered why hu...