Amanda Longhurst

“At the club, nicknames stuck like dog hair to merino wool. A wiry, anxious weekend player called Phil who’d once missed a crucial putt when he was distracted by the call of a skein of Canada geese overhead was thereafter known to all as ‘Quack’. Carl Marchwell, who was infamous for telling all of his playing companions in great detail about his week and lacked the skill of self-editing, hadn’t been called ‘Carl’ by anybody at the club for years; he was always ‘Jackanory’. Ian Welcombe, who liked to bet big money on foursome matches but had never, to anybody’s knowledge, actually won, was ‘The Bank’. Jill, Ian’s wife – one of the few female members of the club who actually seemed to enjoy the game – was not ‘Jill’ but ‘Mrs Bank’. Recently I’d overheard people talking about somebody called ‘Jam Jar’ but I was yet to find out who that was.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“Hard to feel bad for a middle-aged white man.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“More and more, he found landscape and the landmarks within it sucking him back into past conversations, ghost feelings, old ambiences. It went beyond that, though. Even without the power of an evocative image as a trigger, he was able to spend whole hours – sometimes longer – swimming in a vanished event or afternoon.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“because they’ve survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less