Status Updates From Leçons

It is the demon, youth, that sustains him. Curious, resilient, savage in its hunger for experience. 'Ah, Youth!' is the story's refrain.

This was what the far-off belligerent gods, Khrushchev and Kennedy, had arranged for him.

Thelonious Monk- 'Round Midnight'

Afterwards she said, 'You play the dotted notes like a jazz musician.' It was a rebuke he took as praise.

He relaxed a little when she almost fumbled over a run of notes, a private game of mischievous Mozart.

He smelled of lemony cologne. That day he was free of acne. There was something indefinably unwholesome about him. Something lean and snakelike.

eyelashes as thick and dark as prison bars

At school he lived the mental life of a dog chained to a constant present.

Roland had once capsized on that River Orwell, a lovely blue from a distance, an open sewer up close.

'Three young heads brimming with goodness and courage sliced from their bodies.'

Memories had a long half-life.

They weren't there, they can't know. The fear! Now it's history it's no longer real. It's just words now. They don't realize how young we were. They can't understand the pure feeling we had. Journalists today are atheists. They don't want to know how strong our religious faith was.'

There was no radioactive dust. It was madness. He knew that. His circumstances were mad and he can do as he liked.

Also, a respect for order derived from his father insisted that what was started must be finished.

He was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him step through into a paradise regained.

A clean and ordered home remained her passion.

'Red and green, his mother said, should never be seen.'

But he was the mass. He would be treated like the idiot he always was.

'Self-consciousness was the death of a notebook.'

'This was how most messes were cleared, smoothed thin to invisibility.'

Seamus Heaney once said that a writer's duty was to turn up at the desk. Whenever the baby slept in the day Roland turned up and waited and often, head on the desk, slept too.