MANCHESTER UNITED

Just for future reference, don’t use words like “love” anymore. It’s a very sensitive word and it wears out quickly. Romeo barely says it, but John Hinckley filled up a whole journal with it. To put it into your terms, it’s a currency that’s easily devalued. Pretty soon you’re saying it whenever you hang up the phone or whenever you leave. It turns into an apology. Then it’s an excuse. Some assholes want it to be a bulletproof vest: don’t hate me; I love you. But mostly it just means—more. More, more—give me something more. A couple of years from now, when you’re on your own completely, if you really fall in love, if it really comes to that—and I pity you if it does—you have to look right down into the black of her eyes, right down into the emptiness in there and feel everything, absolutely everything she needs and you have to be willing to drown in it, Kevin. You’d have to want to be crushed, buried alive. Because that’s what real love feels like—choking. They used to bury some women in their wedding dresses, you know. I thought it was because all those husbands were too cheap to spring for another gown, but now it makes sense: love is your first foot in the grave. That’s why the second most abused word is “forever”.

Plus, I think angry people are funny. I always have. What’s funny about anger is that you’ve basically got somebody saying, in a spoilt voice: “I want the biscuit!” However, the irony is, their behaviour is guaranteed to keep them many miles away from the nearest available biscuit. And they can’t see that. They are the ones putting a glass box around the biscuit, putting it into a safe, then throwing the safe into the sea and swimming in the opposite direction. I love watching that. It’s a glimpse of what it means to be human - that with so much reason and speculation and amazing social structures, humans can still fall victim to this.