I try to like the way the world is changing, but there seems to be no extra room for me inside. — Martin Amis

The world is boiling. You hardly dare open a paper these days: the news is all of cataclysm and collapse. Tempers are threadbare; the yobs are winning; everybody accepts the fact that they’ve got to get nastier in order to survive. The world is going bad on us. I’m having nothing to do with it.

The past weaves round all this; we still duck in and out of its lost but shimmering kingdoms.

We kept nearly bumping into each other, unavoidably. I wished we could stop avoiding each other long enough to agree to avoid each other properly.