As the Pope says…

‘As the Pope said to the earnest visitor who wondered how long he ought to stay in Rome to know it well: Two days, very good. Two weeks, better. Two years, not long enough?’ Alistair Cooke

‘The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well.’ Julian Barnes

Definite article

‘My first beer memory is of my granddad raising his pint of nutty bitter to my lips in the pub garden of The Barley Mow on Englefield Green - the smell of cigarettes on his fingers, mingling with the Brylcreem in his hair and the Old Spice aftershave he used to wear. I didn't like the ale much, but I loved him, so I took another sip.’ Melissa Cole FT

A report from Vevo, a video streaming service, cites Gen Z as leading a rise of "borrowed nostalgia", with two-thirds reporting an emotional attachment to eras they never experienced.

“If you leave absence in a work, you make room for the spectator," he says. "If an artwork only has one interpretation, it's not art. It's communication." Ryan Gander

Charles and Ray Eames invented a pioneering leg splint to transport soldiers injured in the second world war. The project taught the designers how to manufacture moulded plywood efficiently, leading to an estimated 150,000 splints produced for the US military.The splints laid the technical foundation for their famous moulded chairs.

"The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he, or she, has become a threat.” James Baldwin

Netflix's audio logo - which the company variously calls "ta-dum", "toudum" and "tudum" - comprises a few different pieces: the knocking of Oscar-winning sound designer Lon Bender's wedding ring on a cabinet, the striking of an anvil, other "muted hits" and an electric guitar. "Any sound is made up of four sounds, generally," Bender says. They had previously considered using the bleat of a goat.

Yes I played with matches…

YES

I played with matches. I did not keep my hands inside the car. I stood in front of the yellow line and did not mind the gap. I consumed nothing in moderation. I walked on the grass and drove while drunk. I smoked. I fed the birds. I bent and ran and touched and entered. I disturbed, not least by tapping loudly on the glass. I never told the whole truth. Having failed to shower before entering the pool, I smoked, petted, bombed and performed acrobatics in the diving area. I operated heavy machinery when under the influence. I ate the same meal as my co-pilot and engaged in non-essential conversation below 10,000ft. I fired the director and took the job myself, but never let my work expand to fill the available time. I made graven images of silver and gold and bowed down to them. I did not keep the sabbath holy and did not honour my father and mother. I neither took this man to be my lawful wedded husband nor promised to honour and obey. I committed adultery, bore false witness, and stole. I walked away and took my love to town. I did not slow down. I let the sound of my own wheels drive me crazy. I passed GO and collected £200. I will not behave. I will not remain calm. I will not do as I am told and I swear to God that I will not let the sun go down on me. Mark Haddon

THE BUSY LIFE

The drunken man. The jumping boy. The stroller with the coxcomb hair. Pencil shavings. Watercress. Formica. All-Bran. Trombones. Good cheese. Bad blood. Mere alcohol. The scrotum-tightening sea. The twist of colour at the centre of a marble. Car exhaust. The foggy, foggy dew. Stray pubes in bed and breakfast plugholes. Toffee. Moonrock. Gun-smoke. Wickerwork. Brown lines in old soap. The snows of yesteryear. The squeak of wellingtons in fresh snow. Snow on snow on snow. The crack of river ice. The smell of lemons. Tides that moving seem to sleep. The grainy light that hangs in rooms at 3am. A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces. Semen. Castor oil. Mud. The way you wear your hat. The gap between the lightning and the thunder. Moonlight. Good times. Boogie. Mittens. Sex-toys. Dappled things. The empty page below the final line. Mark Haddon

DeCapite tells me that lately he's been reading a lot about time - "although I can't say that I've made any progress"….. The subject then returns to Brian Eno - how, when he was recording his masterpiece, Another Green World, Eno found himself in tears. Well, it is a beautiful piece of music, I say. “No, that wasn't it," he says. “It was because he realised he had no idea what he was doing." - FT

Early in her career, she grasps that medicine is less about highbrow science, more about understanding patients' stories. When later she explains her decision to become an endocrinologist to a medical student, she tells him she likes "talking to people and finding out about their lives". Her interlocutor tells her this would be his idea of hell - his ambition is anaesthesia.

How do you…

How do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, screamers, dog's cocks, or shrieks.

Another listing reads simply "Drum Solo": cue for the main man to cleave the air like a Chinook taking off. He can still tear up the joint like he did when he first burst onto the scene, but over time he's absorbed Miles's famous lesson: it's all about the notes you don't play.

‘Wednesday night has been trivia night for as long as Oh Sherri has been open. The pub, tucked away in the corner of a strip mall along the road between the sleepy Alabama towns of Leeds and Moody, is reliably packed for the quiz. Eager teams oflocals crowd round the tables that the owners, Joel Wallace and his wife Diana, made by hand. Last week, though, they had a problem. Oh Sherri also serves as home base for the devoted and size-able football community in this corner of Alabama. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, a few dozen descend to watch the Premier League; over the last few weeks, they have done a roaring trade for the World Cup, too.’ Fans in a State of Fervour - Rory Smith  FT

The recent BBC podcast Everything Is Fake (And Nobody Cares) had an episode dedicated to the illusory nature of WWF wrestling in the 1980s and how it formed "an unexpected blueprint for modern American politics". Audiences know that the spectacle is not real, but accept it and play their part in the deception.

Reasonable adjustment

"What does a happy marriage sound like?" the great American philosopher of marriage, Stanley Cavell, once asked. Bickering is the answer. "Bickering that is itself a mark, not of bliss exactly, but say of car-ing". Marriage, he wrote, is a "devotion to repetition, to dailiness".

The true con…

"The true con artist doesn't force us to do anything: he makes us complicit in our own undoing... we believe because we want to." The Confidence Game, Maria Konnikova

Author of Enshittification is fond of observing: you won't be replaced because an AI can do your job, you'll be replaced because an AI salesman convinces your boss that it can.

There's a tale about the French poet Jacques Prévert seeing a fellow begging for change on the streets of Venice with a sign that read "Blind man without a pension". Prévert stopped to chat to him; not many people were moved to contribute, and Prévert offered to write a new sign. The next day, he returned to find the man overjoyed. "It's incredible; I've never received so much money in my life." Prévert had written: "Spring is coming, but I won't see it." The new sign contained no news - in fact, it was less informative than the old. But it told a story.

One message found by an American collector with a tally of 150 message in bottles in 20 years, was written on Princess Cruises notepaper: "It's been interesting, it's the end of a 8 year relationship. We are both putting messages in a bottle... Brenda, hope you find what you are looking for. Love, Frank."

It is in darkness that we can see furthest. The darker the night, the brighter and more numerous the lights in the sky. Billions of them. Satellites, planets, stars and galaxies. These are distances so vast that by the time much of that celestial light hits our retinas, what we're seeing may no longer exist.

For much of his life he celebrated his birthday on the wrong day. O'Hara was born into an emotionally complicated household in Massachusetts, to parents who were overwhelmed by Catholic guilt about sex before marriage and decided that a later date, June 27, would be for the best.

The man appeared…

The man appeared to be independent of oxygen.

Having my hair cut, the young barber, Tyler, says he is also a trained roofer and sometimes when it’s sunny outside longs to be fixing up slates again. Instead he is stuck inside working on the tops and sides of heads.

She thought she was feeding the hedgehogs but she was feeding the rats.

Full of holes

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" Marie Oliver

…her grandmother Esther, whom she describes as keeping “a blade on her tongue, sharpened and meant to draw blood".

When I die, I am simply going nowhere.

“More breaks than Soft Joe.” Liverpudlian saying

In 1726, a woman from Godalming in Surrey named Mary Toft claimed that she had given birth to rabbits.

News spread fast through pam-phlets, newspaper reports and the coffee houses. Was the story true or not?

Physicians, including the king's doctor, examined her and, far from dismissing her claim immediately, came to different conclusions. The emerging scientific method did not result in a definitive answer. Only when Toft was threatened with a "very painful experiment", after a long period of being observed, did she admit the hoax.

After a certain age the body is working overtime on no extra pay.

Weightless episodes hang like stalactites in the caves of your memory.

She looked like she was standing over a drain.

The cloud on the horizon was no bigger than a man’s hand.

‘Dodging’, ‘burning’, ‘bleaching’ and ‘spotting’, are all terms for enhancing hand printed photographs in a ‘wet’ darkroom.

Today is more about being than doing.

Half the harm…

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them.” TS Eliot

‘Thanks or no thanks to two hearing aids, I can eavesdrop on my own body. I can hear my stomach gurgle and my ankles groan, which I find disturbing, at one point mistaking it for creaking floorboards’ Alan Bennett

Those were yeasty times.

"Memory is not false in the sense that it is wilfully bad," Diski says, "but it is excitingly corrupt in its inclination to make a proper story of the past." Her impulse to go to Antarctica doesn't come from a desire to travel but from an addiction to the “boundless expanses of white" she remembers from her time in a psychiatric.

Wheeler offers Raban's description of Morris in her prime, and it captures her perfectly: "She was a proper traveller with the traveller's gift for swimming in the stream without drowning in it... sensible jeans and sensible blouse, a sensible headscarf... She spoke in an eager alto, with a trace of dry rust around its edges, leaping from emphasis to emphasis, alighting for a second on a word in italics, like a chalk-hill blue in a meadow of dogroses... I felt sincere, unstinting admiration for the careless, artful style with which she had made herself at home in this singular and alien landscape."

The pleasure steamers

‘For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent.’ The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

Desire blown up by loss and longing.

An hour already with nothing to stare at but crab apples in the gravel.

The brain is…

‘The brain is an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern’ Charles Scott Sherrington

Prosopagnosia = face blindness. An untreatable neurological condition that results in an inability to recognise faces, even of loved ones.

‘…with a mother who, distrusting tap water, drinks only vodka, whittling herself down to the size of "a skin bag with chalk in it, far too light to be human". Brawler, Lauren Geoff

‘Hospital is an intriguing word. It shares its root with host, hotel, guest and, of course, hospitality. It ought then to be a place of welcome and care. Yet at some point in the past century the contemporary hospital became a kind of machine in which everything was subjugated to process, hygiene and efficiency - understandably. But in that evolution much was lost.’ Edwin Heathcote FT

Makeshift

In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote, "totalitarianism replaces all first-rate talent with crackpots and fools, whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."

He didn’t want to die, he just wanted to visit.

‘The treasures of Venice are like dreams told before breakfast. When they leave the light of La Serenissima they turn to dross.’ ……. ‘The air smells of trash and salt and, at this time of year, honeysuckle-to me, the scent of Rome.’ Two Cities, Cynthia Zarin

Spirit Level

In Search of Otto

In Italy, to fail at something, to draw a blank, is a buco nell'acqua. A hole in the water.

Of a time when we used to catch rabbits and tickle fish.

A Man Overwinds…

A man overwinds his son’s clockwork clown. It’s no longer funny.

A man wipes the sleep out of a dog’s eye

The blue is the colour of a boarding school, a place where boys run like sweat itself.

Hatchback chat.

I have a friend whose mother always made the family eat custard because she heard it prevented radiation build up.

Love wasn’t built in a day.

"I was born on Christmas Day; my mother was very apologetic and the doctor said: Madame Bourgeois, really you are ruining my festivity." The birth of the artist Louise Bourgeois

‘Knowledge is both alive and fragile.

It is embodied in people, and the teams and communities they form, and is transmitted through repeated, almost ritualistic practices. Imagine trying to train a new generation of surgeons in a world where no surgeons remain…….it is reasonable to say that knowledge is like a shark: it must keep moving to stay alive.’ Cesar Hidalgo FT

One of his last requests was that his dancing shoes be placed in his casket, because he planned to "dance with the angels." When told that they might not be dancers, he said that he would teach them.

‘The BBC late night ‘shipping forecast’ is always 370 words long….it is the verse of both longing and leaving.’ AA Gill

We walked out in to the chilly sodium night

Failing forward…

Failing forward.

‘Those summer evenings were all alike. As Marie-Jose used to say, we had to make the time pass. Of its own accord, it didn't, or wouldn't: the days lingered like overripe fruit, soft and heavily scented, melting into the glaucous dusk. We gathered by the hotel pool, on the cliff top, after supper, watching the sky falter into Prussian blue, to blue-black, and the moon rising over the Mediterranean, the sea spread out before us, whispering and wrinkled. Every night the white, illuminated bulk of the island ferry ploughed its furrow across the water and receded to the horizon, the only marker of another day's passage.’ Adults - Claire Messud

Nothing wasted.

‘I love it because it folds into a perfectly flat square.’ Overheard

Four German neologisms that describe everyday sensations: Tageslichtspielschock (DAY-LIGHT-SHOW-SHOCK) - Being startled when exiting a cinema into broad daylight Mahlneid (MEAL-ENVY) Coveting thy neighbour's restaurant order Enlistungsfreude (DE-LISTING-JOY) The sense of satisfaction afforded by crossing things off lists Luftfahrtorigaminiedergeschlagenheit (AVIATION-ORIGAMI- DESPONDENCY) The sense of deflation when your paper airplane falls straight to the ground.

‘At first the camp appears as colours against the dust. Then, lifting my gaze, I see plastic, orange tarpaulin, clothing bleached by the sun. These are hues that suggest people have already stayed too long.’

She has a voice like corduroy.

The beginning of rest of my life.

Pfft

Things to be done.

The taste of…

The taste of coconut, vanilla and tobacco, with a texture as reassuringly soft as a favourite armchair.

“I remember seeing the horse box turned over in the ditch. It wasn't raining - it wasn't particularly sunny either. It was sort of mild." Recollections of an emergency paramedic

Things are not black and white, 90% of things are grey.

‘It has dear, good people, beautiful women, charming innocent children, animals that enjoy their lives, butterflies on the stones in the Turkish cemetery. And yet the War began here, the world was destroyed, and Sarajevo has survived. It shouldn’t be a city, it should be a monument to the terrible memory.’ Where the War Began, Joseph Roth

Faltering footsteps

But it changes your perception of life, because they point you to how life is really made up of tiny moments, even when enormous events are going on.

The fishermen were…

“The fishermen were promised the earth and all they got was sand” Overheard comment in Cornwall on the eventual outcome of Brexit

“I don’t touch electricity” Overheard

"Maybe this is how the afterlife works. You go to a restaurant and instead of getting a menu and some breadsticks you find out you're dead." Evan Dando

‘Always go further into the water than you feel comfortable with. Wait till your feet barely touch the bottom.’

Garnish

The past falls open anywhere

Vergissmeinnicht, German for forget-me-not, the small blue flower.

‘He said he had a nodo alla gola, a knot in his throat. It was lodged in at the bottom of his windpipe, and it kept his head separated from his heart, his stomach, his lungs. He carried this knot in his throat with him everywhere. When he thought of his friends and patients. When he’d visited their graves. He said many of his colleagues also had this knot in their throat. Men and women who’d intubated and ventilated those who’d fallen sick. It was there, constantly. They carried on with their jobs same as before, only now with a knot caught deep down in their throats, not letting them breathe.’ Abbandonati, Rory Gleeson

Sticky blood

‘The name Jeff, originating from England, holds a significant meaning rooted in religion and tranquillity. Derived from the Old English name Geoffrey, Jeff is a combination of two elements: Geo, meaning God, and frith, meaning peace. This etymology reflects the name's historical ties to spirituality and the desire for harmony.’ Ancestry.com

Time is the most precious thing we have

Beautiful mistakes

The prisoners on Alcatraz developed a real flair for rendering their own heads in toothpaste, soap, scraps of toilet roll, hair collected from the floor of the barber shop.

Huge skies, flat, corduroy fields lined with cabbages…

Soft men…

Soft men with soft hands

‘In order to survive your skin has to become hard’ Ukrainian resident

In prison, it occurred to Smith that there were only two things people could not take away from her: "my tattoos and my education.”

Thomas De Quincey became a visionary in 1791 when he was six years old. His older brother William was looking for a way to walk on the ceiling upside down like a fly.

Richard, whom they called Pink, signed on to a whaling ship and was captured by pirates. The other siblings were depressives. Thomas leafed listlessly through the pages of Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp.

“I ordered him a brown book” Overheard

“Buy one birthday cake, get one free” Overheard

He was feeling shut out, as he waits for key-hole surgery.

If you see something that does not look right.

Beginnings and endings are always awkward. I am no good at hellos and she’s useless at goodbyes.

"It's really fun to write a ghost story when the lights are on. When the lights go out, nobody needs a ghost story any-more. They need hope." Shonda Rhimes

"And then in Switzerland, you have the mountains but you don't have the sea.” Hans Ulrich Obrist

In 1995 McArthur Wheeler robbed two banks with lemon juice on his face believing it would make him invisible to security cameras like invisible ink. He even smiled at the cameras and was caught within hours. His case inspired the research that led to the discovery of the Dunning Kruger effect. Wheeler’s lemon-juice blunder has since become a textbook example of this effect. It demonstrates how ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowledge, it can foster misplaced certainty. His case, though humorous in hindsight, underscores a universal human flaw: the less we know, the more likely we are to overestimate our abilities.

There steep growth in the sale of ‘gourmand’ body scents that smell of food, like chocolate, pear and coconut. It seems commensurate to the rise in weight loss meds. New fragrance obsession has replaced emotional eating; instead of eating the cake, we want to be it.

We can ask…

‘We can ask and ask but we can never have back the things we thought we would have forever’ A Month in the Country, JL Carr

Weaponised incompetence

The decision to learn a foreign language, John le Carré wrote shortly after the Brexit vote, is "an act of friendship... It's a promise to educate - yes — and to equip. But also to awaken; to kindle a flame that you hope will never go out ... FT Henry Mance

Dreaming spires and lost dogs / Take the corner down a trifle / We're only an inch apart on the map of England / He kissed her all over the map of Europe / He hid his face amid a crowd of stars / Fooling over clouds / Swimming with women / The sea is green / World of wood / Small man with a big hat / Gizzard Park / Dogs blanket / Pillow talk

‘But when from the long distant past nothing subsists, after people are dead, after things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more enduring, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of their recollection.’ Swans Way - Marcel Proust

You can fit a lifetime into an hour over a few pints in a Welsh pub.

A grandmother who collects pebbles?'

Sugar plum.

Poetry is when words touch each other.

He left lying down looking at his feet

‘You should have been talking to Sunny Man’ overhead

‘His neck was fat and he blamed the shirt. Top Man’ overheard

She had waterproof eyes

His face was…

His face was the colour of old bones

She talks in italics

His was the sort of face that sheep count in the night when they cannot sleep.

Scarcely has a lyric carried so much freight and remained airborne.

The white man drew a small circle in the sand and told the red man, 'This is what the Indian knows,' and drawing a big circle around the small one, 'This is what the white man knows?' The Indian took the stick and swept an immense ring around both circles: 'This is where the white man and the red man know nothing? Carl Sandburg

We sleep in linen, we cook in wine

What with one thing on top of another

Useless Bay / Despised Lake / Deceit Island - places in Tierra Del Fuego named by explorers

For nearly the first century and a half of its existence, America's geographic position kept it secure from the world. As one European observer noted: "On the north she had a weak neighbour; on the south, another weak neighbour; on the east, fish; and on the west, fish."

I was drowning…

I was drowning 2,000 feet above sea level.

For what we know as history 'proper' is always made between times, as, rooted in the present, we negotiate a past that is not, as we commonly think, unilinear but multilinear. The past is not the action of the arrow of time pointing forever forward, but more like the flames of a brazier, constantly changing, reaching up and then falling low. Fire and water.

Time is like a river on which we move, but the banks through which the river flows are themselves in constant movement too.’  Patrick Joyce on the photographs of Josef Koudelka

The Space Between Friends / Out of Order / Humbuggery

Sailor Step / Sailor Step / Stomp / Slide / Shuffle / Half Turn / Pivot line dance moves

The positive power of pessimism

This is what a scream with no vowels sounds like. This is the weight of the soul leaving the body. The arms are no longer connected to the legs, the legs have been severed from the lungs, the lungs have lost contact with the heart and the heart is getting ghosted by the brain. Amanda Anisimova sits on her chair, baking in the heat, stewing in sadness. She dabs her face with a towel and hopes people won’t notice she’s wiping away tears.

A silence passes…

A silence passes between them, brittle and porous, like old bones.

Europe spends more on facial fillers than the world spends on research into emerging infectious diseases.

The bits I wanted to edit out are the bits I needed to keep

Hard edged thinking

‘She liked the saints, angels, miracles and mysteries, and the fact that, for Catholics, 'anything can happen to anyone.’

In the 1860s photographers everywhere advertised their services with the slogan "secure the shadow ere the substances fades".

The weight of a life/ the air smells of stone

‘What did she hope for, he wondered, as she scrutinised these men over plates of oysters, fish tacos and bone marrow?’ A Big True, Dinah Nayeri

Many Andean cultures practised the curious art of cranial deformation - binding a child's head to achieve a particular shape. Living at opposite ends of the canyon, the Collaguas and the Cabanas traced their origins back to different mountains and their ideal head shapes reflected the profiles of those peaks. The Collaguas tried to achieve a pointed shape, like the summits of the Collaguas mountains, while the Cabanas wanted more of a flat-top look like Ampato, which looms above the canyon.

Some people have started to call her a "star" since the news broke, she says. "When I was young, a 'star' meant a film star, but now when I think of stars I think of the stars in the sky, which is where you go when you're dead. And I don't want to be that kind of star." Marlene Dumas

Sips turned to straws…

‘Sips turned to straws turned to syringes of water we carefully squirted into his mouth. His swallow migrated. We dipped pink medical lollipop-sponges in ice water and moved them like dentists around his mouth.’ FT Laura Coffey

Section 46 funerals - public funeral of those with no known relatives or next of kin.

Time to look at beautiful things, marvellously done.

Ageing is a privilege and not for the faint hearted.

She said the secret to her longevity was "never arguing with anyone, I listen and I do what I like".

An expression of interest.

The older he gets the more he stares into corners.

‘Jenny's legs had gotten so thin his pants hung off them. Whatever sickness he had seemed to be getting worse. His face wasn't smooth and puffy anymore. His cheekskin hung on two cheek-bones. Oily skin under his eyes the color of chow mein. Looking at it made me hungry, even though I hated chow mein.’ ‘Cougar’ Maria Anderson

Remain party - the prejudices of the suburban golf club are imported to the council-estate boxing club... a kind of ventriloquised xenophobia.’

‘My grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste. She had radiant teeth.’

My dreams vanish…

My dreams vanish on contact / memory is inherently porous

The dadaist Francis Picabia once put it like this: “Our heads are round so that our thoughts can change direction.”

The happiness of people in a country is measured on their perception of the return of a lost wallet.

"suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting-room window:'Hitler is making a speech. I shouted back, I shan't come. I'm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.'" Leonard Woolf’s autobiography

favourable weather / fast moving things

Hertzbaracke = heart attack

Humblebrag

Robbers here have a sense of humour. If the door is unlocked, they won’t come in.

Pigeon lung - a condition of pigeon fanciers breathing in dust from feathers and dung

The French speak of un syndrome de glissement, a slide to death prompted by utter hopelessness.

Expecting / visible mending / young offenders

We carry in our coccyx what remains of a vanished tail

Caveat emptor must have been the motto of the shopkeeper: cayenne was mixed with brick dust and red lead, coffee was stretched with chicory, and chicory with parsnips. Tea was mixed with "lie tea" - tea dust stuck together with gum - and once steeped, the leaves were collected and sold again. Henry Mayhew interviewed a tea-leaf collector: "I get them honestly and sell them honestly, and that's all I can say about it. Every little helps, and if rich people won't pay poor people properly, then poor people can't be expected to be very nice."

You’ve got to admit…

‘You’ve got to admit that it’s difficult, he says, having a wife flying above you at 17,000 miles an hour. Never knowing where she is or where to find her.’ Orbit - Samantha Hardy

“No," she replies, emphatically. "It's just that over and over again I am really struck by how ordinary people get through their day. Sometimes it almost strikes me as a sort of miracle. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. People don't have a lot to hope for in average lives and yet they make do, and on the whole they behave, they behave very well. That is pretty amazing." Anne Tyler

Michael Rosen poem that starts: “I sometimes fear that / people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress.”

danger -  origin of the word was from the mid-13th-century Anglo-French word ‘daunger’, meaning arrogance or insolence.

Etymologically, hobo might come from "homeward-bound boys", American civil war soldiers trying to get home or to find odd jobs on which to build a new life after the fighting ceased.

‘Out through the window at a radiance doubling and redoubling. The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we're on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.’ Orbital - Samantha Harvey

He spoke in a whisper, even in the desert.

"Two main rules if you're a travel writer and married,' explains another of Theroux's gone-to-seed grouches: "Number one, don't whistle while you pack... Number two, don't come back with a tan." Paul Theroux

Short cuts / Small acts / Clearing the air

Keep your eye on…

‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.' David Lynch

Temporary escalation space (TES) is the translation for the hospital corridor.

‘I’m not good at multi-choice. Too many answers make me overthink.’ Overheard

‘I know guys going into battle loaded with weapons, tattoos up their necks, hardcore – but they’re not singing [Black Sabbath’s] ‘War Pigs’, they’re singing something pop, something easy, or perhaps a Beatles song just for the melody – a love song to make them smile!’ Ukrainian soldier

She is someone who lights candles rather than curses the dark

The boundary is the horizon

‘You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough‘ William Blake

‘Once I was visiting my auntie Marge. She was doing her laundry. She turned to me and said, “you know? I love this machine much more than I do your uncle Walter.”’ John Cage