Sublime

Dean buys pirated video games set in the same region he was deployed to back in Afghanistan. I know he misses it. I know how good he was at it. I know he gave it up to be with me. I want to tell him I’m sorry he’s stuck in this remote prison of silence, far away from his colleagues and watering holes and adrenaline-soaked purpose. But I can’t say a

Just back from four days at Asheham and one at Charleston. I sit waiting for Leonard to come in, with a brain still running along the railway lines, which unfits it for reading. But oh, dear, what a lot I’ve got to read! The entire works of Mr James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, so as to compare them with the entire works of Dickens and Mrs Gas

Pat wondered if the couple even considered the gardener an ‘optional expense’ or if they’d hang on to the help until the whole ship was at risk of going down.

This particular night, he was also bummed out by the fact that his cat had died, finished off by a mouse that was in the process of being finished off by some D-Con poison. It was heartrending to hear him talk of the cat as someone with whom he could “communicate” in a building full of people who did not talk to one another. He added that the cat s

Because Sylvie understood her older sister so well, she knew Julia was not only mourning him but reeling from the fact that he had died at all. Julia hadn’t planned for him to die, and that shock threatened her entire worldview. Their father’s absence was, after all, unfixable.

the reason so many of them are so unhappy – despite being generally very well paid – is the convention of the ‘billable hour’, which obliges them to treat their time, and thus really themselves, as a commodity to be sold off in sixty-minute chunks to clients. An hour not sold is automatically an hour wasted. So when an outwardly successful, hard-dr