Status Updates From The Night in Question

"All these other lifetimes. All these different choices that she could have made and which, in the years to come, Florrie would imagine–all the different outcomes, all with Jack in them (Jack kissing her forehead, Jack by her side)."

We cannot resist thinking of how life might have been. But, in reality, we know no more about the possible outcomes than we did about the one we chose before we chose it.

We feel that we, as individuals, might somehow be exempt from it [old age], that we might be given some sort of ticket that allows us to sidestep death, as one might a manhole cover, and carry on, whistling a tune. And then, one day, we find that our knees crack as we descend a staircase or someone offers us a seat on a tube train or we catch sight of ourselves in a shop window and think ‘Good God, that can’t be me’.

Did she think it would always be this way? Florrie supposes so. As a child (or a lucky one, at least), one believes all beds will be toasty. One thinks that these voices you hear downstairs or calling for you at dusk, through cupped hands, will always be there–loving and healthy and strong.

How true is this. As a child I thought my parents would go on forever.

Renata saw in this Florrie the Florrie she used to be: boisterous, healthy, capable of vaulting a gate or of drinking a pint as quickly as a man; the woman who’d fallen in love more than once–and, on occasion, been loved in return. … Who is, one might argue, the real and proper one? To be seen.

how on earth had it come to this; how she was looking at care homes for the elderly when she still felt twenty years old inside, still believed she could do headstands, and when there was still so much that she want to do with her life--like swim the English Channel or ride across plains with proper cowboys, learn the trumpet or walk the Camino de Santiago with all her belongings on her back.

This book is so delightful