Just Another Book Snug

To be broke in New York was to feel a constant, needling sense of failure, as you were regularly confronted by people who had not only more but much, much more.

Before I got off the bus, I made an internal list of people who could touch my hair. 1. Me 2. A hairdresser 3. That's it, that's the whole list.

'If I'm better than you, it's only because I'm Irish.'

'You were born worried.'

She's smiling up at the sky. The bruise has faded out of her voice.

My confidence hit a new low when my friend Adeline told me that French children often make mistakes, but never with the sex of their nouns... Tired of embarrassing myself in front of two year-olds, I've started referring to everyone in the plural, which can get expensive but has solved a lot of my problems... A masculine kilo of feminine tomatoes presents a sexual problem easily solved by asking for two kilos of tomatoes.

'The white man's god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man.'

She wants to leap up and do a handstand, or get someone to race her fast and far enough to wreck them both: anything that will turn her body back into something that's about what it can do, not all about how it looks.

Is this what growing into an adult woman is, having to predict and accordingly arrange for the avoidance of sexual harassment?

It is an extension of a well-known problem in liberalism which has been recognized even among those who did once fight a noble fight. It is a tendency identified by the late Australian political philosopher Kenneth Minogue as ‘St George in retirement’ syndrome. After slaying the dragon the brave warrior finds himself stalking the land looking for still more glorious fights. He needs his dragons. Eventually, after tiring himself out in pursuit of ever-smaller dragons he may eventually be found swinging his sword at thin air, imagining it to contain dragons.

An evening in early November, the air just starting to flare with little savoury bursts of cold and turf-smoke.

I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight.

‘If you make friends inside some bubble that’s going to burst on you in a couple of years - like training, or like here - you’re an idiot. You start thinking that’s the whole world, nowhere else exists, then you end up with all this hysterical shite. Best friends forever, she-said-you-said-I-said wars, everyone working themselves into fits over they don’t even know what.’

The scullery was a mine of all the minerals of the living. Here I discovered water... You could pump it in pure blue gulps out of the ground, you could swing on the pump handle and it came out sparkling like liquid sky.

I longed for water. There it was before me. Not the blue estuary of home, rippling, and salty fresh, whipped with sea spray but a slow-moving turgid stream, brown like the river bed beneath it, oozing and sucking its way under the arches of the bridge, and ever and again its flat smooth surface breaking into bubbles.

Sing, Muse, he said, and I have sung.

Few men I think can have been as unfortunate as he; for on the one hand he was a melancholic with a loathing for mankind, on the other, some paralysis had twisted his mouth into a permanent and radiant smile. So everyone he met, being warmed by his smile, would shout him a happy greeting. And beaming upon them with his sunny face he would curse them all to hell.