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Maureen and Harold stood beside her in silence, coming to terms once more with how utterly life vanishes.

She kept lists in the kitchen and bedroom. There was so much to do. And yet sometimes, when she looked out of the window, or lay awake listening to the gulls crying like children, she felt that despite her activity there was something about it that was inactive, as if she were missing the point.

We hang on by so little, he thought, and felt the full despair of knowing that.

It was hard to have been her guest. It was hard to understand a little and then walk away.

For awhile there was only the silence that carried her words. It struck Harold afresh how life can change in an instant. You could be doing something so everyday -- walking your partner's dog, putting on your shoes, and not knowing that everything you wanted you were about to lose.

He fell silent, and so did Martina. He felt safe with what he had confided. It had been the same with Queenie. You could say things in the car and know she had tucked them somewhere safe among her thoughts, and that she would not judge him for them, or hold it against him In years to come. He supposed that was what friendship was, and regretted all the years he had spent without it.

If he had comforted her, he could have let her go. As it was, he knew that in meeting her, and listening, he was carrying another weight in his heart and he was t sure how much more of that he could take.

It had been unbearable to hear those things, and even though she had wept in his arms afterwards, and apologized, they were in the air when he was alone, and there was no unsaying them.

Harold was so tired he could barely lift his feet, and yet He felt such hope, he was giddy with it. If he kept looking at the things that were bigger than himself, he knew he would make it to Berwick.

The inhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.

It must be the same all over England. People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And no one else knew the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside.

It struck him as strange but true that tourists bought trinkets and souvenirs of religious places because they had no idea what else to do when they got there.

You know, there are some things you hold sacred without even knowing it until you look around one day and realize the world's turned into something you don't recognize anymore.

Dad doesn't comeback to say goodbye. His means of survival was to get away, get as far away as possible and pretend none of it, and none of us, ever existed. To be honest, I understand that. He cut himself free so he would not be dragged under.

I suppose, woodenly, that my lack of sentimentality has turned out to be a good thing, that it was right, in the end, no t to keep anything of my mother's, and to tell myself it was because I wanted nothing from her or of her.

Look, at some point you have to choose your own life. We all separate from our parents.
That sounds cold even to me. I do t tell him that it's not his job to carry his family. It is his job because he has decided it is. I understand this maybe better than anyone. I think of the things I decided to carry, and how I made myself strong enough to do so.

I see his faults and I see what we lack. I can see that we fractured, and I know we both feel betrayed by the other. There is distance between us now and distance is like concrete cancer. With time it's fatal.

In the years we have been together it has become very clear to me that he does not see me at all. I am actually not so bothered by this; what an ordeal it would be, to be known.

'Ordinary' people were predisposed toward hearsay, prejudice, ill-placed anger and an absence of objectivity. They were easily steered.

What of the self-serving short-sightedness or plain folly or mendacity or viciousness of political leaders -- and the quiescence or craven idiocy or terror of their populations? What of the people's careless love of autocrats? How could we overlook or forgive the desolation these times bequeathed, the poisons they left in our oceans, the forests thy stole, the soils
And rivers they ruined...

Rose thought I was subject to distorted notion
of the period (1990-2030) in which we specialized. I exaggerated the vitality and beauty of the past and ignored its squalor and cruelty and morbid greed. The stupidity and waste would suffocate me or make me insane. So would the nastiness of social media, then run for profit.

I entered your life. You never entered mine.

We are all innocent children in the tall forest of our clever inventions.

The Great Derangement explores the "imaginative failure" of society to address the climate emergency. The term highlights the bizarre contradiction between knowing the risks and failing to act, making the present day seem absurd from the perspective of the future.

In her most d-teens she had turned her back on the entirety of her parents' beliefs, but by late middle age had come to acceptance t that she was shaped by her past and could do nothing about it.

'On Floral Street' is about a long list for shrinking, gradually divesting itself of friends, family, possessions -- and ultimately, meaning.....
So it went, a merry poem about death.

Wit is largely the preserve of the agile-minded young.

The fallen towels landed in a heap of plastic detritus from his various medications, near a set of fresh, folded pajamas, which he would now
Never where, an a stack of books he would now never read. Everything in the room was touched with the chaos that disrupted the operating energy of a household at such a time and showed that, all along, the appearance of control had been an illusion.

My charge cast a furtive glance at his father to see what all he knew. Some of it, Father wouldn't like. Father's polestar being honesty. An absolute, cornpone honesty that brooked none of the complexity that real accomplishment required. Hence the failures. The repeated failures.

Is it lying when one knows how one wants those things to turn out and then says what is needed to achieve that result? Lying when a person uses his considerable reputation and his mastery of public communication to thrash his opponents by redirecting th attention of the general populous, this infecting the people with the tiniest sliver of doubt, which, widely propagated, becomes a sizable wedge of doubt?