The first effect of abroad is strangeness. It makes me strange to myself. I experience a transfer, a transparency.
I am tired and drunk and still hungry. He is full of steak and Coca-Cola and, presumably, energy: enough energy to cross the road and walk up the steps inside the tower of the cathedral, which I have...
We sit in the ruin, each reading a book, or three of us read out of four. Three different voices speak to us. We have taught the children to read again this week. Here, where there is no voice, apart...
There are so many of you, and you are still just the way I thought I'd grow up, with all that was enviably grown-up about you: the lace tops with modesty inserts, and the spangles as if for nights out...
There is something about my face in the mirrors that catch it. Even at a distance it will never be right again, not even to a casual glance. Beauty: it's the upkeep that costs, that's what Balzac said...
