I'd Thought I'd Live With My Wife,

Phone Calls Like Ours Only Happen When You've Spent Several Years Hurting And Being Hurt, Until Every Work You Utter Or Hear Becomes Coded And Loaded, As Complicated And Full Of Subtext As A Bleak And Brilliant Play.

Where's The Superficial? I Was, And Therefore Am, Dim, Gloomy, A Drag, Unfashionable, Unfanciable, And Awkward. This Doesn't Seem Like Superficial To Me. These Aren't Flesh Wounds. These Are Life-threatening Thrusts Into The Internal Organs.

Not For The First Time In My Life, And Certainly Not For The Last, A Self-righteous Gloom Had Edged Out All Semblance Of Logic.

When You Get Older, It Feels Like Happy Memories And Sad Memories Are Pretty Much The Same Thing. It Is All Just Emotion In The End. And Any Of It Can Make You Weep.

By The Early Seventies I Had Become An Englishman - That Is To Say, I Hated England Just As Much As Half My Compatriots Seemed To Do.