Status Updates From A Month in the Country

“I mean to say—the pride of Uffizi walking abroad in, God help us, Oxgodby!”

“Already I felt part of it all, not a looker-on like some casual visitor. I should like to have believed that men working out in the fields looked up and, seeing me there, acknowledged that I’d become part of the landscape, ‘that painter chap, doing a job, earning his keep.’”

There’s an awful lot of romantic tension between these two men 🤔

“Are you here to try to crawl back into the skin you had before they pushed you through the mincer?”

“As far as I’m concerned he might just as well have gone round the corner and died. But that goes for most of us, doesn’t it? We look blankly at each other. Here I am, here you are. What are we doing here? What do you suppose it’s all about?… Yes, that’s my Dad and Mum over there on the piano top. My eldest boy is on the mantelpiece…. Now you know all about me. Go away: I’ve forgotten you already.”

“This is what I need, I thought—a new start and, afterwards, maybe I won’t be a casualty anymore.

Well, we live by hope”