Harbour Me Quotes

Bilbo’s Last Song Day is ended, dim my eyes, But journey long before me lies. Farewell, friends! I hear the call. The ship's beside the stony wall. Foam is white and waves are grey; Beyond the sunset leads my way. Foam is salt, the wind is free; I hear the rising of the Sea. Farewell, friends! The sails are set, The wind is east, the moorings fret. Shadows long before me lie, Beneath the ever-bending sky, But islands lie behind the Sun That I shall raise ere all is done; Lands there are to west of West, Where night is quiet and sleep is rest. Guided by the Lonely Star, Beyond the utmost harbour-bar, I’ll find the heavens fair and free, And beaches of the Starlit Sea. Ship, my ship! I seek the West, And fields and mountains ever blest. Farewell to Middle-earth at last. I see the Star above my mast!

I have never cared for Castles or a Crown that grips too tight, Let the night sky be my starry roof and the moon my only light, My Heart was born a Hero, my storm-bound sword won't rest, I left the Harbour long ago on a Never-ending Quest, I am off to the horizon, where the wild wind blows the foam, Come get lost with me, love, and the sea shall be our home!

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. ... To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve, and cherish, the pale blue dot; the only home we've ever known.

In my mind, I built stairways. At the end of the stairways, I imagined rooms. These were high, airy places with big windows and a cool breeze moving through. I imagined one room opening brightly onto another room until I'd built a house, a place with hallways and more staircases. I built many houses, one after another, and those gave rise to a city -- a calm, sparkling city near the ocean, a place like Vancouver. I put myself there, and that's where I lived, in the wide-open sky of my mind. I made friends and read books and went running on a footpath in a jewel-green park along the harbour. I ate pancakes drizzled in syrup and took baths and watched sunlight pour through trees. This wasn't longing, and it wasn't insanity. It was relief. It got me through.

Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere, I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move With all that move me, under the water

Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. "Light! give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.

Mental' isn't a reason. It comes in an awful lot of flavors, most of them are non-violent, and every single one of them has some kind of logic, whether or not it makes sense to you and me.

Steep are the seas and savaging and cold In broken waters terrible to try; And vast against the winter night the wold, And harbourless for any sail to lie. But you shall lead me to the lights, and I Shall hymn you in a harbour story told. This is the faith that I have held and hold, And this is that in which I mean to die.

I have never cared for castles or a crown that grips too tight, Let the night sky be my starry roof and the moon my only light, My heart was born a Hero, My storm-bound sword won't rest, I left this harbour long ago on a never-ending quest. I am off to the horizon, Where the wild wind blows the foam, Come get lost with me, love, And the sea shall be our home.

(...) a course laid between the seed and the snare marks of venerable syringes ordered to excite the awareness of Transcendence first and last harbour the disinfecting of exile on the bridge no one, only me, searching for approaches and testing traitor neurons grading thoughts repenting in an incomprehensible tongue and again attempting to show the splash-down of a world which moves up and down within the walls of experience a tragedy which travels unruffled hell without sinners without return (...)

Imagination! lifting up itself Before the eye and progress of my Song Like and unfather'd vapour; here that Power In all the might of its endowments, came Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud, Halted without a struggle to break through, And now recovering to my Soul I say I recognize they glory; in such strength Of usurpation, in such visitings Of awful promise, when the light of sense Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode There harbours whether we be young or old. Our destiny, our nature, and our home Is with infinitude, and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be.

Sometimes it’s hard to grasp why it is that the answers to the present lie in the past. A simple analogy might be helpful: a leading psychiatrist in the field of sexual abuse once told me she had, in thirty years of extensive work with paedophiles, never met one who hadn’t himself been abused as a child. This doesn’t mean that all abused children go on to become abusers; but it is impossible for someone who was not abused to become an abuser. No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it: ‘A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.’ As babies, we are innocent sponges, blank slates – with only the most basic needs present: to eat, shit, love and be loved. But something goes wrong, depending on the circumstances into which we are born, and the house in which we grow up. A tormented, abused child can never take revenge in reality, as she is powerless and defenceless, but she can – and must – harbour vengeful fantasies in her imagination. Rage, like fear, is reactive in nature.

Now goes under, and I watch it go under, the sun That will not rise again. Today has seen the setting, in your eyes cold and senseless as the sea, Of friendship better than bread, and of bright charity That lifts a man a little above the beasts that run. That this could be! That I should live to see Most vulgar Pride, that stale obstreperous clown, So fitted out with purple robe and crown To stand among his betters! Face to face With outraged me in this once holy place, Where Wisdom was a favoured guest and hunted Truth was harboured out of danger, He bulks enthroned, a lewd, an insupportable stranger! I would have sworn, indeed I swore it: The hills may shift, the waters may decline, Winter may twist the stem from the twig that bore it, But never your love from me, your hand from mine. Now goes under the sun, and I watch it go under. Farewell, sweet light, great wonder! You, too, farewell,-but fare not well enough to dream You have done wisely to invite the night before the darkness came.

Just about everything in this life is treacherous, ready to twist and shape-shift at any second; it seemed to me that the whole world would be a different place if you had someone you were certain of, certain to the bone, or if you could be that to someone else.

The sudden, painful flare of envy caught me by surprise. I was a loner, my last few years in school. I could have done with a friend like that.

I was just a dark heart wrapped in a pretty pink bow. It astonished me how many people chose to focus on the beautiful ribbon instead of what it harboured inside.

I let myself into the cellar, locked the door behind me. The cellar was cold. I found the whisky, let myself out of the cellar and locked it, turned all the lights out, gave Mrs McSpadden the bottle, accepted a belated new-year kiss from her, then made my way out through the kitchen and the corridor and the crowded hall where the music sounded loud and people were laughing, and out through the now almost empty entrance hall and down the steps of the castle and down the driveway and down to Gallanach, where I walked along the esplanade - occasionally having to wave to say 'Happy New Year' to various people I didn't know - until I got to the old railway pier and then the harbour, where I sat on the quayside, legs dangling, drinking my whisky and watching a couple of swans glide on black, still water, to the distant sound of highland jigs coming from the Steam Packet Hotel, and singing and happy-new-year shouts echoing in the streets of the town, and the occasional sniff as my nose watered in sympathy with my eyes.

My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate. I have no father. There's nothing unusual about that -even children who do have fathers are often surprised to see them. My own father came out of the sea and went back that way. He was crew on a fishing boat that harboured with us one night when the waves were crashing like dark glass. His splintered hulll shored him for long enough to drop anchor inside my mother. Shoals of babies vied for life. I won.

Coming so close to death as a young child, only to resurface again into your life, imbued in me for a long time a brand of recklessness, a cavalier or even crazed attitude to risk. It could, I can see, have gone the other way, and made me into a person hindered by fear, hobbled by caution. Instead, I leapt off harbour walls. I walked alone in remote mountains. I took night trains through Europe on my own, arriving in capital cities in the middle of the night with nowhere to stay.

I was obsessed with him. I wasn't quite in love, nor was I simply harbouring a mild crush. I was never not thinking of him. Everything he said intrigued me, everything he did fascinated. I revered even the parts in him I knew cerebrally would have frustrated me were I not in such a foolheartedly, dreamy plight.

I never told you about the trip to Portugal 3 years ago when I read Fernando Pessoa at 1 a.m. outside a small family-run restaurant by the harbour. If I close my eyes I can still smell the salt water and the fish, some sort of cleaning powder scent from the kitchen, can still feel the heat, a soft wind and me sitting with wide open eyes on my own at 1 a.m. writing what I thought was profound and excellent. I felt like a writer then. I was not a girlfriend or a daughter or a songwriter who never got signed—I was a writer in the truest sense and I lived in my own flames.

Here, I could see, was choice matter on which the expert and art critic could exercise their knowledge and judgment. As I had neither, I made an experiment or two, and was able to inform the readers of the paper that if you walked briskly past the picture, winking both eyes as fast as possible, you really got a sort of impression of movement and activity, of ships and boats coming into the harbour and sailing out of it, of sails lowered and hoisted, of an uncertain background, now obscured, now left visible as a ship in full sail passed before it. It struck me that, in my hands, art criticism was in a fair way to become a popular sport.

Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part, less of the loud mosaic of one's stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead, whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens. A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Grass. And yet whose unearthly beauty compelled one to say: God forgive me.

FAUSTUS. Ah, Faustus, Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damn'd perpetually! Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease, and midnight never come; Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make Perpetual day; or let this hour be but A year, a month, a week, a natural day, That Faustus may repent and save his soul! O lente,172 lente currite, noctis equi! The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd. O, I'll leap up to my God!—Who pulls me down?— See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ!— Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ! Yet will I call on him: O, spare me, Lucifer!— Where is it now? 'tis gone: and see, where God Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows! Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me, And hide me from the heavy wrath of God! No, no! Then will I headlong run into the earth: Earth, gape! O, no, it will not harbour me! You stars that reign'd at my nativity, Whose influence hath allotted death and hell, Now draw up Faustus, like a foggy mist. Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud[s], That, when you173 vomit forth into the air, My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths, So that my soul may but ascend to heaven! [The clock strikes the half-hour.] Ah, half the hour is past! 'twill all be past anon O God, If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul, Yet for Christ's sake, whose blood hath ransom'd me, Impose some end to my incessant pain; Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd! O, no end is limited to damned souls! Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul? Or why is this immortal that thou hast? Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true, This soul should fly from me, and I be chang'd Unto some brutish beast!174 all beasts are happy, For, when they die, Their souls are soon dissolv'd in elements; But mine must live still to be plagu'd in hell. Curs'd be the parents that engender'd me! No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer That hath depriv'd thee of the joys of heaven. [The clock strikes twelve.] O, it strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air, Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell! [Thunder and lightning.] O soul, be chang'd into little water-drops, And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found! Enter DEVILS. My God, my god, look not so fierce on me! Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while! Ugly hell, gape not! come not, Lucifer! I'll burn my books!—Ah, Mephistophilis! [Exeunt DEVILS with FAUSTUS.]

Yet those Sundays, when I was seven, marked the beginning of my exile from the world I loved. Like a ship that leaves a port for the vast expanse of sea, those much looked forward to days took me away from the safe harbour of childhood towards the precarious waters of adult life.

the first riddle of the universe: asking, when is a man not a man?: telling them take their time, yungfries, and wait till the tide stops (for from the first his day was a fortnight) and offering the prize of a bittersweet crab, a little present from the past, for their copper age was yet un-minted, to the winner. One said when the heavens are quakers, a second said when Bohemeand lips, a third said when he, no, when hold hard a jiffy, when he is a gnawstick and detarmined to, the next one said when the angel of death kicks the bucket of life, still another said when the wine's at witsends, and still another when lovely wooman stoops to conk him, one of the littliest said me, me, Sem, when pappa papared the harbour, one of the wittiest said, when he yeat ye abblokooken and he zmear he zelf zo zhooken, still one said when you are old I'm grey fall full wi sleep, and still another when wee deader walkner, and another when he is just only after having being semisized, another when yea, he hath no mananas, and one when dose pigs they begin now that they will flies up intil the looft. All were wrong, so Shem himself, the doctator, took the cake, the correct solution being — all give it up? — when he is a — yours till the rending of the rocks, — Sham.

One of the reasons I love Murder is that victims are, as a general rule, dead... I don't make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me fore a sicko or- worse-a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims don't show up outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry, and you never have to worry about what it'll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there.

Don’t cry over me, Liv, I’m not worth it.” “You like to pretend you’re so tough.” She smiled, a delicate, shaky curl of her lips. “How about you don’t cry over me, okay?” He lifted their hands, still gripped together, and kissed her knuckles. “You’re totally worth my tears, baby.

I did not harbour intelligent doubts about whether Hartley would go on loving me, naturally I knew that she was mine forever. But as we closed our eyes upon tears of joy there was cosmic dread.

Gustav Levi is calm for the first time. A ship that’s been hurled by the storm into harbour. He’s where he wants to be. He is finally inside me, taking full physical possession. Fucking me. He increases his pace, thrusting once, twice more, his pleasure, my pleasure, this wonderful new calmness and belonging, then as the storm crashes over us, over the chalet, battering at the mountain, we come together.

Perfect Timing" The night I fell in love with you I lost my watch: stripping off at the sea’s edge, it fell into the dark as I swam out into a night thick with stars, with fisherman calling from one lit boat to another of their catches and harbours, leaving for the dawn. Imagine it now, plunged deep in cool sand, still hidden years later, grains ticking over it one by one— as your hands slide into me and I move to their pulse.

One of those awfully simple and beautiful days with you that makes me afraid of dying, makes me afraid of not being. When the soft 6 o’clock sun is slowly sinking behind the harbour, and your smile, effortless and tidy, makes time take flight. You save me from death but also from lifeless living. With you, nothing's wasted on me. The music of the breeze, the colours of children’s footsteps, the dancing trees—I drink them all and, what’s more, you drink these with me. One of those insignificant days when we do nothing and achieve nothing, and yet, chasing the ducks and sharing my last stick of gum with you is everything.

And I get this brand-new weird sensation: I am the island, the island is me. The harbour mouth is my mouth and the sea is turning inside me. And there are fish swimming in me, and seals, and seabirds flying through me.

The difference between her and me might be figured by that between the stately ship, cruising safe on smooth seas, with its full complement of crew, a captain gay and brave, and venturous and provident; and the life-boat, which most days of the year lies dry and solitary in an old dark boat-house, only putting to sea when the billows run high in rough weather, when cloud encounters water, when danger and death divide between them the rule of the great deep. No, the 'Louisa Bretton' never was out of harbour on such a night, and in such a scene: her crew could not conceive it; so the half-drowned life-boat man keeps his own counsel, and spins no yarns.

If she be a woman, and love me, I shall surely catch her once tripping: for love was ever a traitor to its harbourer: and Love within, and I without, she will be more than a woman, as the poet says, or I less than man, if I succeed not.

I liked the darkness, the dusty bay window, the view over the grey, muddy harbour and the towering cliffs beyond. How could I think of all that and dislike it, really, when in every nook and cranny I felt Peter’s eyes peering out, watching me?

Whereas I had kept my distance from others all my life. I had not bothered them, and they had not bothered me, and so I harboured no anger. It was only my loneliness that ate at me, and it was this same loneliness that led me to betray myself in myriad ways.

Poem in October" It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore The morning beckon With water praying and call of seagull and rook And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall Myself to set foot That second In the still sleeping town and set forth. My birthday began with the water- Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name Above the farms and the white horses And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days. High tide and the heron dived when I took the road Over the border And the gates Of the town closed as the town awoke. A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder, Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly Come in the morning where I wandered and listened To the rain wringing Wind blow cold In the wood faraway under me. Pale rain over the dwindling harbour And over the sea wet church the size of a snail With its horns through mist and the castle Brown as owls But all the gardens Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud. There could I marvel My birthday Away but the weather turned around. It turned away from the blithe country And down the other air and the blue altered sky Streamed again a wonder of summer With apples Pears and red currants And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sun light And the legends of the green chapels And the twice told fields of infancy That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine. These were the woods the river and sea Where a boy In the listening Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide. And the mystery Sang alive Still in the water and singingbirds. And there could I marvel my birthday Away but the weather turned around. And the true Joy of the long dead child sang burning In the sun. It was my thirtieth Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. O may my heart's truth Still be sung On this high hill in a year's turning.

I think Horatio be my destin'd plague: First, in his hand he brandished a sword, And with that sword he fiercely waged war, And in that war he gave me dangerous wounds, And by those wounds he forced me to yield, And by my yielding I became his slave. Now in his mouth he carries pleasing words, Which pleasing words do harbour sweet conceits, Which sweet conceits are lim'd with sly deceits, Which sly deceits smooth Bellimperia's ears, And through her ears dive down into her heart, And in her heart set him, where I should stand.

... what you get out of life is mostly what you planted. Not always, no, but mostly. If you think you're a success, you will be a success; if you think you deserve nothing but crap, you'll get nothing but crap. Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life. Do you follow me?

Physiological stress, then, is the link between personality traits and disease. Certain traits — otherwise known as coping styles — magnify the risk for illness by increasing the likelihood of chronic stress. Common to them all is a diminished capacity for emotional communication. Emotional experiences are translated into potentially damaging biological events when human beings are prevented from learning how to express their feelings effectively. That learning occurs — or fails to occur — during childhood. The way people grow up shapes their relationship with their own bodies and psyches. The emotional contexts of childhood interact with inborn temperament to give rise to personality traits. Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood. There is an important distinction between an inherent characteristic, rooted in an individual without regard to his environment, and a response to the environment, a pattern of behaviours developed to ensure survival. What we see as indelible traits may be no more than habitual defensive techniques, unconsciously adopted. People often identify with these habituated patterns, believing them to be an indispensable part of the self. They may even harbour self-loathing for certain traits — for example, when a person describes herself as “a control freak.” In reality, there is no innate human inclination to be controlling. What there is in a “controlling” personality is deep anxiety. The infant and child who perceives that his needs are unmet may develop an obsessive coping style, anxious about each detail. When such a person fears that he is unable to control events, he experiences great stress. Unconsciously he believes that only by controlling every aspect of his life and environment will he be able to ensure the satisfaction of his needs. As he grows older, others will resent him and he will come to dislike himself for what was originally a desperate response to emotional deprivation. The drive to control is not an innate trait but a coping style. Emotional repression is also a coping style rather than a personality trait set in stone. Not one of the many adults interviewed for this book could answer in the affirmative when asked the following: When, as a child, you felt sad, upset or angry, was there anyone you could talk to — even when he or she was the one who had triggered your negative emotions? In a quarter century of clinical practice, including a decade of palliative work, I have never heard anyone with cancer or with any chronic illness or condition say yes to that question. Many children are conditioned in this manner not because of any intended harm or abuse, but because the parents themselves are too threatened by the anxiety, anger or sadness they sense in their child — or are simply too busy or too harassed themselves to pay attention. “My mother or father needed me to be happy” is the simple formula that trained many a child — later a stressed and depressed or physically ill adult — into lifelong patterns of repression.

If her mind had held even the smallest chance of a future, she would have had no reason to tell me anything at all, whether or not it could send her to prison. But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk off the edges of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone's mind; or maybe all they want is is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else's hands, so it won't weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.

Chaston wrote that a great many fairies harboured a vague sense of having been treated badly by the English. Though it was a mystery to Chaston — as it is to me — why they should have thought so. In the houses of the great English magicians fairies were the first among the servants and sat in the best places after the magician and his lady.

I replied that I did not quite know what my ailment had been, but that I had certainly suffered a good deal especially in mind. Further, on this subject, I did not consider it advisable to dwell, for the details of what I had undergone belonged to a portion of my existence in which I never expected my godmother to take a share. Into what a new region would such a confidence have led that hale, serene nature! The difference between her and me might be figured by that between the stately ship cruising safe on smooth seas, with its full complement of crew, a captain gay and brave, and venturous and provident; and the life-boat, which most days of the year lies dry and solitary in an old, dark boat-house, only putting to sea when the billows run high in rough weather, when cloud encounters water, when danger and death divide between them the rule of the great deep. No, the "Louisa Bretton" never was out of harbour on such a night, and in such a scene: her crew could not conceive it; so the half-drowned life-boat man keeps his own counsel, and spins no yarns.

Stop smiling at me, you handsome devil.

Don't laugh, it's people like her who make this lousy world a place worth visiting.' 'Whores?' 'No. We're all whores, sooner or later. I mean good-hearted people. And don't look at me like that. Weddings turn me to jelly.' We remained there embracing that special silence, gazing at the reflections on the water. After a while dawn tinged the sky with amber, and Barcelona woke up. We heard the distant bells from the basilica of Santa Maria del Mar, just emerging from the mist on the other side of the harbour. 'Do you think Carax is still there, somewhere in the city?' I asked. 'Ask me another question.' 'Do you have the rings?' Fermin smiled. 'Come on, let's go. They're waiting for us, Daniel. Life is waiting for us.

He offered me his free hand, clear blue eyes sparkling. "Come on...let's go find ourselves the perfect tree." I took his hand and leaned into his shoulder. Didn't he know I'd go anywhere with him?

One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant and sad—into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence, blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore, the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. Om Mani padme hum—I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus. Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger.

For as long as I could remember, a part of me had been waiting for the day it would happen; with the cunning that comes to people whose minds have been stripped to one desire, she picked the only day we weren't waiting for.

And on the day we left, ‘It’s heart-breaking. To go away from this, the one place that I love. Everything is covered in dust-sheets, windows shuttered, it reminds me of the last act of The Cherry Orchard. I go over the whole place before we leave—visit every corner of the garden and gaze for a long while at the sea. I tell them all that I shall be back soon and they understand. It all belongs to me now. One last trip in Cora Ann down-harbour before we go. Then the train.… Oh God, to exchange this for dreary bloody London.…

Yes, I'm the one who washes the plates and glasses They call me an easy woman When they give me a penny I still have to say thank you Here I am, in ragged clothes At the bottom of this shabby hotel Today, you don't know who I am Today, you don't know who I am   But one evening, one beautiful evening A big commotion People running along the shore Saying: "Look who's coming!" And me, I'll smile for the first time They'll say: "You, you're smiling now?"   A big ship A hundred cannons at the portholes Will enter the harbour!   I'll always be washing The glasses and plates I'll always be an "easy woman" When they give me a penny I'll always say thank you I'll keep my ragged clothes At the bottom of this shabby hotel And tomorrow, tomorrow like today You'll never know who I am!   But one evening, that beautiful evening for which I live Look how the cannons Wake up and turn For the first time, I'll burst out laughing "What, brat, you have the heart to laugh?"   That big ship A hundred cannons at the portholes Will bombard the harbour!   Then the sailors will come to shore More than a hundred, they'll mark with a cross of blood Every house, every door And it's before me that will be brought Enchained, imploring, mutilated and bloodied Your kind, all your kind, fine gentlemen! Your kind, all your kind, fine gentlemen!   Then the one I'm waiting for will appear, he'll say to me: "What is it that you want from all these people I'm killing?" And I'll sweetly reply: "Kill them all! For each head that falls I'll clap my hands, here we go! And that big ship, Far from the city where everything will be dead Will carry me towards life!

You call me but I can't hear. I speak a language you don't know. The body falling by the side of the bed. Eyes closed contemplating the night. I conjugate language that doesn't exist. The imaginary and its child the failurative. I speak stiff, the language she didn't teach me before she left. I speakstiff with all my stiffened body. I want to come back to you but I can't. Because of the red liqueur which is spreading in my blood. Because of the red liqueur which paralyses my brain. I can't come back to you. I'm slipping out to sea as I look back at the harbour. You're holding my hand but you're only holding on to wood. You're speaking to me but I hear only the walls. You're smiling but I'm on the other side of the mirror. The woman in mauve is carrying me off to her castle. And the silent coachman accompanies her.

The Ball Poem" What is the boy now, who has lost his ball. What, what is he to do? I saw it go Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then Merrily over—there it is in the water! No use to say 'O there are other balls': An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down All his young days into the harbour where His ball went. I would not intrude on him, A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now He senses first responsibility In a world of possessions. People will take balls, Balls will be lost always, little boy, And no one buys a ball back. Money is external. He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes, The epistemology of loss, how to stand up Knowing what every man must one day know And most know many days, how to stand up And gradually light returns to the street, A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight. Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere, I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move With all that move me, under the water Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

And as we stood there, a curious thing happened: a kind of window opened in the rain, just as if a cloud had been hitched aside like a curtain, and in the space between we saw a landscape that took our breath away. The high ground along which the road ran fell away through a black, woody belt, and beyond it, for more miles than you can imagine, lay the whole basin of the Black Country, clear, amazingly clear, with innumerable smokestacks rising out of it like the merchant shipping of the world laid up in an estuary at low tide, each chimney flying a great pennant of smoke that blew away eastward by the wind, and the whole scene bleared by the light of a sulphurous sunset. No one need ever tell me again that the Black Country isn't beautiful. In all Shrophire and Radnor we'd seen nothing to touch it for vastness and savagery. And then this apocalyptic light! It was like a landscape of the end of the world, and, curiously enough, though men had built the chimneys and fired the furnaces that fed the smoke, you felt that the magnificence of the scene owed nothing to them. Its beauty was singularly inhuman and its terror – for it was terrible, you know – elemental. It made me wonder why you people who were born and bred there ever write about anything else.

I am of opinion that if the names of contributors were to be inscribed as benefactors for all time, many foreigners would be induced to contribute, and possibly not a few states, in their desire to obtain the right of inscription; indeed I anticipate that some kings, tyrants, and satraps will display a keen desire to share in such a favour. [...] Were such a capital once furnished, it would be a magnificent plan to build lodging-houses for the benefit of shipmasters in the neighbourhood of the harbours, in addition to those which exist; and again, on the same principle, suitable places of meeting for merchants, for the purposes of buying and selling; and thirdly, public lodging-houses for persons visiting the city. Again, supposing dwelling-houses and stores for vending goods were fitted up for retail dealers in Piraeus and the city, they would at once be an ornament to the state and a fertile source of revenue. Also it seems to me it would be a good thing to try and see if, on the principle on which at present the state possesses public warships, it would not be possible to secure public merchant vessels, to be let out on the security of guarantors just like any other public property. If the plan were found feasible this public merchant navy would be a large source of extra revenue.

softly. “Not much you can say to a story like that, is there?” “Not really.” “Yep, I win on the ol’ dramatic story front every time.” They stood in silence for a while. Despite the warmth of the night it was chilly up there, but Stephanie didn’t mind. “What happens now?” she asked. “The Elders go to war. They’ll find the castle empty – Serpine wouldn’t stay there after this – so they’ll be looking for him. They’ll also be tracking down his old allies to make sure they don’t get the opportunity to organise.” “And what do we do?” “We get to the Sceptre before Serpine.” “The key,” she said, “where is it?” He turned to her. “Gordon hid it. Clever man, your uncle. He didn’t think anyone should have access to that weapon, but he hid the key in a place where if we truly needed to find it, if the situation got so dire that we truly needed the Sceptre, all it would take was a little detective work.” “So where is it?” “The piece of advice he gave me, in the solicitor’s office, do you remember what it was?” “He said a storm is coming.” “And he also said that sometimes the key to safe harbour is hidden from us and sometimes it is right before our eyes.” “He was talking about the key, literally? It’s right before our eyes?” “It was, when those words were first spoken in the solicitor’s office.” “Fedgewick has the key?” “Not Fedgewick. He gave it away.” Stephanie frowned, remembering the reading of the will then the lock in the cellar, no bigger than Skulduggery’s palm. She looked up at him. “Not the brooch?” “The brooch.” “Gordon gave the key, the key to the most powerful weapon in existence, to Fergus and Beryl?” she asked incredulously. “Why would he do that?” “Would

Oh, Captain Aubrey,' cried she, 'I have a service to beg of you.' Mrs Fielding had but to command, said Jack, smiling at her with great affection; he was at her orders entirely - very happy - delighted - could not be more so. 'Why then,' she said, 'you know I am a little talkative - the dear Doctor has often said so, desiring me to peep down - but alas I am not at all writative, at least not in English. English spelling! Corpo di Baccho, English spelling! Now if I give you a dictation and you write it down in good English, I can use the words when I write to my husband.' 'Very well,' said Jack, his smile fading. It was just as he had feared: and he must have been quite mistaken about the signals. Mr Fielding was to understand that the excellent Captain Aubrey had saved Ponto from being drowned: Ponto now doted upon Captain Aubrey and ran up to him in the street. Wicked people therefore said that Captain Aubrey was Laura's lover. Should these rumours reach Mr Fielding he was to pay no attention. On the contrary. Captain Aubrey was an honourable man, who would scorn to insult a brother-officer's wife with dishonest proposals; indeed she had such confidence in his perfect rectitude that she could visit him without even the protection of a maid. Captain Aubrey knew very well that she would not ply the oar. 'Ply the oar, ma'am?' said Jack, looking up from his paper, his pen poised. 'Is it not right? I was so proud of it.' 'Oh yes,' said Jack. 'Only the word is spelt rather odd, you know,' and he wrote she would not play the whore very carefully, so that the letters could not be mistaken, smiling secretly as he did so, his frustration and disappointment entirely overcome by his sense of the ridiculous.

Ken Wharfe Before Diana disappeared from sight, I called her on the radio. Her voice was bright and lively, and I knew instinctively that she was happy, and safe. I walked back to the car and drove slowly along the only road that runs adjacent to the bay, with heath land and then the sea to my left and the waters of Poole Harbour running up toward Wareham, a small market town, to my right. Within a matter of minutes, I was turning into the car park of the Bankes Arms, a fine old pub that overlooks the bay. I left the car and strolled down to the beach, where I sat on an old wall in the bright sunshine. The beach huts were locked, and there was no sign of life. To my right I could see the Old Harry Rocks--three tall pinnacles of chalk standing in the sea, all that remains, at the landward end, of a ridge that once ran due east to the Isle of Wight. Like the Princess, I, too, just wanted to carry on walking. Suddenly, my radio crackled into life: “Ken, it’s me--can you hear me?” I fumbled in the large pockets of my old jacket, grabbed the radio, and said, “Yes. How is it going?” “Ken, this is amazing, I can’t believe it,” she said, sounding truly happy. Genuinely pleased for her, I hesitated before replying, but before I could speak she called again, this time with that characteristic mischievous giggle in her voice. “You never told me about the nudist colony!” she yelled, and laughed raucously over the radio. I laughed, too--although what I actually thought was “Uh-oh!” But judging from her remarks, whatever she had seen had made her laugh. At this point, I decided to walk toward her, after a few minutes seeing her distinctive figure walking along the water’s edge toward me. Two dogs had joined her and she was throwing sticks into the sea for them to retrieve; there were no crowd barriers, no servants, no police, apart from me, and no overattentive officials. Not a single person had recognized her. For once, everything for the Princess was “normal.” During the seven years I had worked for her, this was an extraordinary moment, one I shall never forget.

On quitting Bretton, which I did a few weeks after Paulina’s departure—little thinking then I was never again to visit it; never more to tread its calm old streets—I betook myself home, having been absent six months. It will be conjectured that I was of course glad to return to the bosom of my kindred. Well! the amiable conjecture does no harm, and may therefore be safely left uncontradicted. Far from saying nay, indeed, I will permit the reader to picture me, for the next eight years, as a bark slumbering through halcyon weather, in a harbour still as glass—the steersman stretched on the little deck, his face up to heaven, his eyes closed: buried, if you will, in a long prayer. A great many women and girls are supposed to pass their lives something in that fashion; why not I with the rest? Picture me then idle, basking, plump, and happy, stretched on a cushioned deck, warmed with constant sunshine, rocked by breezes indolently soft. However, it cannot be concealed that, in that case, I must somehow have fallen overboard, or that there must have been wreck at last. I too well remember a time—a long time—of cold, of danger, of contention. To this hour, when I have the nightmare, it repeats the rush and saltness of briny waves in my throat, and their icy pressure on my lungs. I even know there was a storm, and that not of one hour nor one day. For many days and nights neither sun nor stars appeared; we cast with our own hands the tackling out of the ship; a heavy tempest lay on us; all hope that we should be saved was taken away. In fine, the ship was lost, the crew perished. As far as I recollect, I complained to no one about these troubles. Indeed, to whom could I complain? Of Mrs. Bretton I had long lost sight. Impediments, raised by others, had, years ago, come in the way of our intercourse, and cut it off. Besides, time had brought changes for her, too: the handsome property of which she was left guardian for her son, and which had been chiefly invested in some joint-stock undertaking, had melted, it was said, to a fraction of its original amount. Graham, I learned from incidental rumours, had adopted a profession; both he and his mother were gone from Bretton, and were understood to be now in London. Thus, there remained no possibility of dependence on others; to myself alone could I look. I know not that I was of a self-reliant or active nature; but self-reliance and exertion were forced upon me by circumstances, as they are upon thousands besides; and when Miss Marchmont, a maiden lady of our neighbourhood, sent for me, I obeyed her behest, in the hope that she might assign me some task I could undertake.

I’m not moving on…. I’ve tried. I can’t do it. You’re it for me

who you want to meet and we’ll bring him to you.’ ‘Abraham is a hostage,’ Satyrus said. ‘You can’t bring him out of Athens, and I need to see him.’ His captains looked at him with something like suspicion. ‘I’m going to Athens,’ he insisted. ‘Without your fleet?’ Sandokes asked. ‘Haven’t you got this backward, lord? If you must go, why not lead with a show of force?’ ‘Can you go three days armed and ready to fight?’ Satyrus asked. ‘In the midst of the Athenian fleet? No. Trust me on this, friends. And obey – I pay your wages. Go to Aegina and wait.’ Sandokes was dissatisfied and he wasn’t interested in hiding it. ‘Lord, we do obey. We’re good captains and good fighters, and most of us have been with you a few years. Long enough to earn the right to tell you when you are just plain wrong.’ He took a breath. ‘Lord, you’re wrong. Take us into Athens – ten ships full of fighting men, and no man will dare raise a finger to you. Or better yet, stay here, or you go to Aegina and we’ll sail into Athens.’ Satyrus shrugged, angered. ‘You all feel this way?’ he asked. Sarpax shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Aekes and Sandokes have a point, but I’ll obey you. I don’t know exactly what your relationship with Demetrios is, and you do.’ He looked at the other captains. ‘We don’t know.’ Sandokes shook his head. ‘I’ll obey, lord – surely I’m allowed to disagree?’ Satyrus bit his lip. After a flash of anger passed, he chose his words carefully. ‘I appreciate that you are all trying to help. I hope that you’ll trust that I’ve thought this through as carefully as I can, and I have a more complete appreciation of the forces at work than any of you can have.’ Sandokes didn’t back down. ‘I hope that you appreciate that we have only your best interests at heart, lord. And that we don’t want to look elsewhere for employment while your corpse cools.’ He shrugged. ‘Our oarsmen are hardening up, we have good helmsmen and good clean ships. I wager we can take any twenty ships in these waters. No one – no one with any sense – will mess with you while we’re in the harbour.’ Satyrus managed a smile. ‘If you are right, I’ll happily allow you to tell me that you told me so,’ he said. Sandokes turned away. Aekes caught his shoulder. ‘There’s no changing my mind on this,’ Satyrus said. Sandokes shrugged. ‘We’ll sail for Aegina when you tell us,’ Aekes said. Satyrus had never felt such a premonition of disaster in all his life. He was ignoring the advice of a god, and all of his best fighting captains, and sailing into Athens, unprotected. But his sense – the same sense that helped him block a thrust in a fight – told him that the last thing he wanted was to provoke Demetrios. He explained as much to Anaxagoras as the oarsmen ran the ships into the water. Anaxagoras just shook his head. ‘I feel like a fool,’ Satyrus said. ‘But I won’t change my mind.’ Anaxagoras sighed. ‘When we’re off Piraeus, I’ll go off in Miranda or one of the other grain ships. I want you to stay with the fleet,’ Satyrus said. ‘Just in case.’ Anaxagoras picked up the leather bag with his armour and the heavy wool bag with his sea clothes and his lyre. ‘Very well,’ he said crisply. ‘You think I’m a fool,’ Satyrus said. ‘I think you are risking your life and your kingdom to see Miriam, and you know perfectly well you don’t have to. She loves you. She’ll wait. So yes, I think you are being a fool.’ Satyrus narrowed his eyes. ‘You asked,’ Anaxagoras said sweetly, and walked away.         3           Attika appeared first out of the sea haze; a haze so fine and so thin that a landsman would not even have noticed how restricted was his visibility.

Aunt Elizabeth," said Katherine one day, "does anybody ever die in Harbour Hill? Because it doesn't seem to me it would be any change for them if they did.

But it didn't matter. Because all it proved was that my mother was sitting out there coatless somewhere, waiting to come home to me. Even as he stared at it, the remark "Your mother's dead" sitting unspoken, like something rotten in our path that neither one of us wanted to be the first to pick up. Even after the kind of day I had had, being taunted at school, and then threatened with incarceration. Even know that when I went home I would face a house full of ghosts, it didn't matter to me. Instead I felt a little stab of joy.

Soon after we were ushered on to an awaiting trawler, which had been commissioned to take us across the English Channel to Cherbourg in the darkness of that very cold winter’s night. Herded on to the deck we had only our kit bags to serve as seats. Slowly the trawler edged out of the harbour and into the Channel. It was a rough crossing and my first experience of sea-sickness. Within an hour the relentless heavy swell had me, along with many others, hanging over the rails being violently sick. I decided to move up near the bridge, thinking if I went higher I might not feel as if I were dying. From out of nowhere a hand grasped my shoulder and a voice said, ‘Here, laddie, get this down you.’ The trawler captain handed me half a mug of brandy and I did my best to gulp down the burning liquid. It was the first time alcohol had passed my lips and it tasted so awful that I could not imagine how anyone could actually enjoy the taste. The captain waited until I had finished then told me to go and sit at the stern. Thanking him, I did so and felt a bit better.

Siempre estarás conmigo y me has enseñado tanto que tu voz me va a seguir hablando.

I am afraid of the sea. I fear the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal whirlpool; the loom of a big ocean swell, sinister and dark, in windless calm; the rip, the eddy, the race; the sheer abyssal depth of the water, as one floats like a trustful beetle on the surface tension. Rationalism deserts me at sea. I’ve seen the scowl of enmity and contempt on the face of a wave that broke from the pack and swerved to strike at my boat. I have twice promised God that I would never again put out to sea, if only He would, just this once, let me reach harbour. I’m not a natural sailor, but a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I’m at sea. Yet for the last fifteen

...He continued to share his trauma around like orange slices. One for you. One for you. One for me. In this way he still retained the entire piece of fruit harboured inside bodies he inhabited.

You were brave to even come anywhere near me. At some level, you knew that every thought you cherished would be taken apart, every grudge you harboured would be thrown back at you, and every ancient dream you held would be put into the fire. It is not just desperation that does that. It is a belief in oneself that one can do better, that one is worth it. You tried to hurt me but you couldn’t. All of it, you did to yourself. You never gave up on me completely, so that means you never gave up on yourself. You did well.

It was a mark of how little we had affected the real life of the place. I suppose part of me had thought of Hong Kong as somewhere essentially British, except with a lot of Chinese people scattered about, for local colour.

Be this as it may, I make a rule of entering a monkey as speedily as possible after hoisting my pendant; and if a reform takes place in the table of ratings, I would recommend a corner for the "ship's monkey," which should be borne on the books for "full allowance of victuals," excepting only the grog; for I have observed that a small quantity of tipple very soon upsets him; and although there are few things in nature more ridiculous than a monkey half-seas over, yet the reasons against permitting such pranks are obvious and numerous. When Lord Melville, then First Lord of the Admiralty, to my great surprise and delight, put into my hands a commission for a ship going to the South American station, a quarter of the world I had long desired to visit, my first thought was, "Where now shall I manage to find a merry rascal of a monkey?" Of course, I did not give audible expression to this thought in the First Lord's room; but, on coming down-stairs, I had a talk about it in the hall with my friend, the late Mr. Nutland, the porter, who laughed, and said,— "Why, sir, you may buy a wilderness of monkeys at Exeter 'Change." "True! true!" and off I hurried in a Hackney coach. Mr. Cross, not only agreed to spare me one of his choicest and funniest animals, but readily offered his help to convey him to the ship. "Lord, sir!" said he, "there is not an animal in the whole world so wild or fierce that we can't carry about as innocent as a lamb; only trust to me, sir, and your monkey shall be delivered on board your ship in Portsmouth Harbour as safely as if he were your best chronometer going down by mail in charge of the master.

me. “Well, I know one thing about my twins. They’re not going to be models. I already tried them out for catalogue work. Within the first ten minutes, Orianthe informed me that she doesn’t like to do boring things and that modelling’s boring. And she’s not going to let her brother do boring things either.” I laughed. The cries of the twins pealed down the hallway as they bounded inside and called Jessie’s name. They must have discovered she was home. “Hey, where’s the pup?” I asked Pria. “Can I see him? Jessie said he’s growing big.” Immediately, Pria rolled her eyes and made a low disparaging sound. “I sent Buster out with the dog walker as soon as I knew Kate was coming over with the kids. He’d knock them flying. Wish I’d never bought him, to tell you the truth. After the break-in, I wanted a watchdog, but I should have paid more attention to the breed. He’s damned strong—even though he’s only nine months old. And he snaps. To tell you the truth, I’m a bit scared of the mutt. I’m having a dog trainer try to rein him in, but if that doesn’t work, he’s gone.” “What a shame,” I said. “Jess told me she’d like to walk the dog sometimes, but that’s not sounding good.” “Nope. The only thing I got right about him is his name. Because Buster has busted everything from doors to shoes.” She shook her head, a sorry smile on her face. The sound of the three children playing became too much. Tommy had once run through this house, too. I stayed for a while longer then made an excuse to leave.     29.                 PHOEBE   Tuesday night   STORM CLOUDS PUSHED INTO THE SKY, making the day darken a good hour before the incoming night. The heavy atmosphere pressed down on me. I opened the window of my bedroom upstairs at Nan’s house, letting the chill air stream in. I could only just catch a glimpse of the water from here. An enormous cruise liner dominated the harbour, staining the water red and blue with its lights. Maybe my small step in seeing Pria and Kate earlier had helped my frame of mind, but I didn’t feel it yet. I was back at square one. I began pacing the room, feeling unhinged. Things were all so in between. Dr Moran hadn’t succeeded in jogging my memory about the letters. She’d said she didn’t think it was possible to do all that I’d done in sleepwalking sessions and so the memory should still be in my mind somewhere. True sleepwalkers rarely remembered their dreams. Not remembering any of it was the most disturbing thing of all. It wasn’t the first time I’d forgotten things. With the binge drinking and the trauma of losing Tommy, there were gaps in my memory. But not a fucking chasm. And forgetting the writing of three notes and delivering them was a fucking chasm. Nan called me for dinner, and we ate the pumpkin soup together. I’d tried watching one of her sitcoms with her after that, but I gave up halfway through. I headed back upstairs. Surprisingly, I was tired enough to sleep. I crawled into bed and let myself drift off. I woke just before four thirty in the morning. The temperature had plummeted—I guessed it was below ten degrees. I’d been dreaming. The dream had been of the last day that Sass, Luke, Pria, Kate,

Ken Wharfe In 1987, Ken Wharfe was appointed a personal protection officer to Diana. In charge of the Princess’s around-the-clock security at home and abroad, in public and in private, Ken Wharfe became a close friend and loyal confidant who shared her most private moments. After Diana’s death, Inspector Wharfe was honored by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and made a Member of the Victorian Order, a personal gift of the sovereign for his loyal service to her family. His book, Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. He is a regular contributor with the BBC, ITN, Sky News, NBC, CBS, and CNN, participating in numerous outside broadcasts and documentaries for BBC--Newsnight, Channel 4 News, Channel 5 News, News 24, and GMTV. My memory of Diana is not her at an official function, dazzling with her looks and clothes and the warmth of her manner, or even of her offering comfort among the sick, the poor, and the dispossessed. What I remember best is a young woman taking a walk in a beautiful place, unrecognized, carefree, and happy. Diana increasingly craved privacy, a chance “to be normal,” to have the opportunity to do what, in her words, “ordinary people” do every day of their lives--go shopping, see friends, go on holiday, and so on--away from the formality and rituals of royal life. As someone responsible for her security, yet understanding her frustration, I was sympathetic. So when in the spring of the year in which she would finally be separated from her husband, Prince Charles, she yet again raised the suggestion of being able to take a walk by herself, I agreed that such a simple idea could be realized. Much of my childhood had been spent on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, a county in southern England approximately 120 miles from London; I remembered the wonderful sandy beaches of Studland Bay, on the approach to Poole Harbour. The idea of walking alone on miles of almost deserted sandy beach was something Diana had not even dared dream about. At this time she was receiving full twenty-four-hour protection, and it was at my discretion how many officers should be assigned to her protection. “How will you manage it, Ken? What about the backup?” she asked. I explained that this venture would require us to trust each other, and she looked at me for a moment and nodded her agreement. And so, early one morning less than a week later, we left Kensington Palace and drove to the Sandbanks ferry at Poole in an ordinary saloon car. As we gazed at the coastline from the shabby viewing deck of the vintage chain ferry, Diana’s excitement was obvious, yet not one of the other passengers recognized her. But then, no one would have expected the most photographed woman in the world to be aboard the Studland chain ferry on a sunny spring morning in May. As the ferry docked after its short journey, we climbed back into the car and then, once the ramp had been lowered, drove off in a line of cars and service trucks heading for Studland and Swanage. Diana was driving, and I asked her to stop in a sand-covered area about half a mile from the ferry landing point. We left the car and walked a short distance across a wooded bridge that spanned a reed bed to the deserted beach of Shell Bay. Her simple pleasure at being somewhere with no one, apart from me, knowing her whereabouts was touching to see. Diana looked out toward the Isle of Wight, anxious by now to set off on her walk to the Old Harry Rocks at the western extremity of Studland Bay. I gave her a personal two-way radio and a sketch map of the shoreline she could expect to see, indicating a landmark near some beach huts at the far end of the bay, a tavern or pub, called the Bankes Arms, where I would meet her.

Ken Wharfe In 1987, Ken Wharfe was appointed a personal protection officer to Diana. In charge of the Princess’s around-the-clock security at home and abroad, in public and in private, Ken Wharfe became a close friend and loyal confidant who shared her most private moments. After Diana’s death, Inspector Wharfe was honored by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and made a Member of the Victorian Order, a personal gift of the sovereign for his loyal service to her family. His book, Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. He is a regular contributor with the BBC, ITN, Sky News, NBC, CBS, and CNN, participating in numerous outside broadcasts and documentaries for BBC--Newsnight, Channel 4 News, Channel 5 News, News 24, and GMTV. It was a strange sensation watching her walking away by herself, with no bodyguards following at a discreet distance. What were my responsibilities here? I kept thinking. Yet I knew this area well, and not once did I feel uneasy. I had made this decision--not one of my colleagues knew. Senior officers at Scotland Yard would most certainly have boycotted the idea had I been foolish enough to give them advance notice of what the Princess and I were up to. Before Diana disappeared from sight, I called her on the radio. Her voice was bright and lively, and I knew instinctively that she was happy, and safe. I walked back to the car and drove slowly along the only road that runs adjacent to the bay, with heath land and then the sea to my left and the waters of Poole Harbour running up toward Wareham, a small market town, to my right. Within a matter of minutes, I was turning into the car park of the Bankes Arms, a fine old pub that overlooks the bay. I left the car and strolled down to the beach, where I sat on an old wall in the bright sunshine. The beach huts were locked, and there was no sign of life. To my right I could see the Old Harry Rocks--three tall pinnacles of chalk standing in the sea, all that remains, at the landward end, of a ridge that once ran due east to the Isle of Wight. Like the Princess, I, too, just wanted to carry on walking. Suddenly, my radio crackled into life: “Ken, it’s me--can you hear me?” I fumbled in the large pockets of my old jacket, grabbed the radio, and said, “Yes. How is it going?” “Ken, this is amazing, I can’t believe it,” she said, sounding truly happy. Genuinely pleased for her, I hesitated before replying, but before I could speak she called again, this time with that characteristic mischievous giggle in her voice. “You never told me about the nudist colony!” she yelled, and laughed raucously over the radio. I laughed, too--although what I actually thought was “Uh-oh!” But judging from her remarks, whatever she had seen had made her laugh. At this point, I decided to walk toward her, after a few minutes seeing her distinctive figure walking along the water’s edge toward me. Two dogs had joined her and she was throwing sticks into the sea for them to retrieve; there were no crowd barriers, no servants, no police, apart from me, and no overattentive officials. Not a single person had recognized her. For once, everything for the Princess was “normal.” During the seven years I had worked for her, this was an extraordinary moment, one I shall never forget.

I’m texting your picture, your name, and your address to one of my flatmates. In case I’m letting your beautiful building blind me to the fact you’re actually a serial killer.” To his credit, he didn’t look at her like she was crazy, just smiled. “I’m a reasonably famous rugby player. I’m on the TV. You can see my half naked ass on a billboard as you drive off the Sydney Harbour Bridge.” “What, you can’t be a serial killer as well?

I eyed my watch: still plenty of time before I was due to meet my wife. We tried to meet for breakfast on a regular basis now that Nadia had left for university and the nest had become empty again. Perhaps it was good for me – a routine for retirement?

I envy your lady a bit. She's lucky.' That gave him pause. 'Kitty? Whatever for? Are you harbouring some deep longing to Complement a rotund leech?' 'It's hard not to envy the one who is held in such high regard by someone so passionate,' she mused. 'It's like you're ready to burst with all the fire you feel. It's intoxicating.' 'Not to me,' he said. 'It's horrible.' 'Caring?' 'Yes. I don't recommend it at all.

His cross is the sweetest burden that ever I bare: it is such a burden as wings are to a bird, or sails to a ship, to carry me forward to my harbour.

I was a poet not because I wanted to be, but because it possessed me, compelled me, as if the words were magic, and I the wand that harboured them. In the chaos of my over full, rioting heart, it was no wonder that poetry was the only way I could hope to express myself.

Kind of like I’m lost at sea and you’re the lighthouse and safe harbour. I know when I’m with you, no one can hurt me.

You’re some sort of ninja or something?” “Something like that.” He blinked at me. “And those guys were what? Pirates?” “Of a sort.” “So I guess that settles that question. Ninjas win. I always thought so.

No, that’s how Tara is pretty much all the time,” said Sparx. “I just pretend she’s talking to me like a normal person, instead of a stoat with an intimate rash, and mostly it works out.

Well, if you really want to know, I’m basically in love with a boy who is totally wrong for me in every way but I just can’t forget about him or give him up even though I should because he did something that really hurt me and he may have even lied to me but I don’t even seem to care that he did so and now he’s just made it harder for me to dislike him because he said a really nice apology and told me everything that I wanted to hear and so I forgave him even though I still deep down harbour some resentment towards him but I’m sure he saw it in my eyes and heard it in my words that I’m still completely pathetically madly head over heels for him and would still love him even if he did it all over again and broke my heart into a thousand pieces.

If she’d asked me to swim naked three times round the island, I’d have said yes. I loved her.

Max grinned triumphantly and grabbed a chair, turning it so that he could sit on it backwards as he leaned close to me. “Tell me about the boyfriend who left you to drown in that car,” he urged, reaching out to touch my cheek. “Did you give him your V-card too?” A flicker of fear shuddered through me as I remembered sinking to the bottom of that river. But he’d been wrong about the V-card guess. I’d given my virginity to a wholly different asshole. “No,” I breathed. “I didn’t.” “You wanna tell the group who did then?” Max asked with a grin, his power wrapping me in thick cords and refusing to let go. In place of the fear that had been pulling at me, I felt lust building in my veins and my flesh heated at the memory of a dark room, roaming hands- Oh hell no, you psychotic asshole! I shoved all of my will into fighting off the pull of his gift and my fist snapped out with every inch of rage I was harbouring against this douchebag. My knuckles collided directly with the centre of his throat. Max fell back off of the chair with a cry of pain and hit the floor with the chair on top of him. The Siren spell was broken and I was on my feet half a second later, flames springing to life in my hands. I spared half a glance at the other Heirs but they only looked on in surprise. This was between me and Max and they weren’t going to get involved for once. “You crazy bitch,” Max wheezed, his voice strangled with pain. “I am a crazy bitch,” I agreed, glaring down at him. “And if you try that screwed up Siren shit on me ever again you’ll find out just how much of a bitch I can be.” He hissed a curse and raised a palm, throwing a wave of water at me. I unleashed the fire in my hands, throwing a torrent of power into the blow and the two Elements collided in the space between us, cancelling each other out with a hiss of steam. Max scrambled backwards, preparing a second blow and adrenaline shot through my limbs. I was outmatched here and he knew it. I may not have been able to fight him with magic but I’d grown up in the shittiest part of town and I sure as hell knew how to brawl like a cornered alley cat. Before he could cast another spell at me, I aimed a kick at his balls. Max grunted a curse as he doubled in on himself, clutching his manhood. I leaned down to speak to him in a low tone. “I’d think long and hard about trying to pull any more secrets from my lips,” I hissed. “Because some of the ones I’m keeping aren’t my own.” His eyes widened in surprise as he looked up at me. “If you tell anyone what I said when you were Song-Spelled then I’ll-” I interrupted him before he could threaten me with anything, my voice low and cold. “It won’t matter what you do to me after. Your secret will be out there. So I think you were just about to agree to keeping your leech powers to yourself.” Max scowled as he propped himself up on one arm, the pain in his balls obviously easing off. “Fine,” he spat, as if he was going to get up but I wanted to really make sure he got the point. I lifted my palms at Max as Darcy cried out in encouragement and I sent a wave of air crashing into him. It caught him in its grip and sent him flying into the air and tumbling away from me across the room. (Tory)

Fear me not: the space that severs us is small, and visible succour is distant. You believe yourself completely in my power; that you stand upon the brink of ruin. Such are your groundless fears. I cannot lift a finger to hurt you. Easier it would be to stop the moon in her course than to injure you. The power that protects you would crumble my sinews, and reduce me to a heap of ashes in a moment, if I were to harbour a thought hostile to your safety.

Time and again, foul things attacked me …’ ” ’ He closed the book. ‘So that’s it for today, folks, thank you to Seamus Heaney and Beowulf, and thanks for listening.’ And they were clapping, and clapping. ‘Well done, a great tribute, he would have been proud.’ One of the old men was shaking Moth’s hand. ‘Hope he’s looking down on the festival this week.’ ‘Sorry, remind me, when did he go? I’ve been walking, lost track of things.’ ‘Two weeks ago. A perfect, perfect tribute, thank you.’ The crowd dispersed and I shoved the hat under my fleece. ‘I didn’t know he’d died. I feel such a disrespectful tit.’ ‘I don’t think he’d mind. Probably would have made him laugh.’ ‘We should go. Did you hear that about a licence?’ Back at the quiet end of the harbour we

Properly speaking, all true Work is Religion: and whatsoever Religion is not Work may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes, or where it will; with me it shall have no harbour. Admirable was that of the old Monks, 'Laborare est Orare, Work is Worship.

Vera put her hand on the woman’s fat slab of an arm. ‘Tell me.’ Tell me your story.

She is here. She is not here. She is reaching out to me with a touch deceptive as down, with hands and fingers that wave like grass around my feet, and her hair falls and falls and falls from her head like streamers of paper rain. She is a maypole woman to whose apron-string streamers I cling and around whose skirts I dance. She is a ship leaving the harbour, tied to me by coloured paper streamers that break and fall into a swirling wake. The wake is a thin black pencil-line that deepens and widens and fills with a greyness that reaches out with tentacles to embrace me. I leap and wake.

Learn Chinese in 5 Minutes  1) That’s not right = Sum Ting Wong  2) Are you harbouring a fugitive = Hu Yu Hai Ding  3) See me ASAP = Kum Hia  4) Stupid Man = Dum Fuk  5) Small Horse = Tai Ni Po Ni  6) Did you go to the beach = Wai Yu So Tan  7) I bumped the coffee table = Ai Bang Mai Fa Kin Ni  8) I think you need a face lift = Chin Tu Fat  9) It’s Very dark in here = Wai So Dim  10) I Thought you were on a diet = Wai Yu Mun Ching  11) This is a tow away zone = No Pah King  12) Our meeting is scheduled for next week = Wai Yu Kum Nao  13) Staying out of sight = Lei Ying Lo  14) He’s cleaning his automobile = Wa Shing Ka  15) Your body odor is offensive = Yu Stin Ki Pu  16) Great = Fa Kin Su Pah

May I assure you that I harbour no matrimonial design on you whatsoever? You may exercise your wit on us with impunity; you are in no danger from me.

The Poised Edge of Chaos Sand sifts down, one grain at a time, forming a small hill. When it grows high enough, a tiny avalanche begins. Let sand continue to sift down, and avalanches will occur irregularly, in no predictable order, until there is a tiny mountain range of sand. Peaks will appear, and valleys, and as sand continues to descend, the relentless sand, piling up and slipping down, piling up and slipping down, piling up - eventually a single grain will cause a catastrophe, all the hills and valleys erased, the whole face of the landscape changed in an instant. Walking yesterday, my heels crushed chamomile and released intoxicating memories of home. Earlier this week, I wrote an old love, flooded with need and desire. Last month I planted new flowers in an old garden bed - one grain at a time, a pattern is formed, one grain at a time, a pattern is destroyed, and there is no way to know which grain will build the tiny mountain higher, which grain will tilt the mountain into avalanche, whether the avalanche will be small or catastrophic, enormous or inconsequential. We are always dancing with chaos, even when we think we move too gracefully to disrupt anything in the careful order of our lives, even when we deny the choreography of passion, hoping to avoid earthquakes and avalanches, turbulence and elemental violence and pain. We are always dancing with chaos, for the grains sift down upon the landscape of our lives, one, then another, one, then another, one then another. Today I rose early and walked by the sea, watching the changing patterns of the light and the otters rising and the gulls descending, and the boats steaming off into the dawn, and the smoke drifting up into the sky, and the waves drumming on the dock, and I sang. An old song came upon me, one with no harbour nor dawn nor dock, no woman walking in the mist, no gulls, no boats departing for the salmon shoals. I sang, but not to make order of the sea nor of the dawn, nor of my life. Not to make order at all. Only to sing, clear notes over sand. Only to walk, footsteps in sand. Only to live.

Aurelian Townshend Kind and True 'Tis not how witty nor how free, Nor yet how beautiful she be, But how much kind and true to me. Freedom and wit none can confine And beauty like the sun doth shine, But kind and true are only mine. Let others with attention sit To listen, and admire her wit, That is a rock where I'll not split. Let others dote upon her eyes And burn their hearts for sacrifice, Beauty's a calm where danger lies. But kind and true have been long tried A harbour where we may confide, And safely there at anchor ride. From change of winds there we are free And need not fear storms' tyranny, Nor pirate though a prince he be.

How Old Is My Heart, How Old? How old is my heart, how old, how old is my heart, and did I ever go forth with song when the morn was new? I seem to have trod on many ways: I seem to have left I know not how many homes; and to leave each was still to leave a portion of mine own heart, of my old heart whose life I had spent to make that home and all I had was regret, and a memory. So I sit and muse in this wayside harbour and wait till I hear the gathering cry of the ancient winds and again I must up and out and leave the members of the hearth to crumble silently into white ash and dust, and see the road stretch bare and pale before me: again my garment and my house shall be the enveloping winds and my heart be fill'd wholly with their old pitiless cry

To be frank, I think the elegant, long sentence is a thing of beauty, a self-contained entity worthy of study all by itself. Consider this sentence by Dylan Thomas from Quite Early One Morning: I was born in a large Welsh town at the beginning of the Great War—an ugly, lovely town (or so it was and is to me), crawling, sprawling by a long and splendid curving shore where truant boys and sandfield boys and old men from nowhere, beachcombed, idled and paddled, watched the dock-bound ships or the ships streaming away into wonder and India, magic and China, countries bright with oranges and loud with lions; threw stones into the sea for the barking outcast dogs; made castles and forts and harbours and race tracks in the sand; and on Saturday afternoons listened to the brass band, watched the Punch and Judy, or hung about on the fringes of the crowd to hear the fierce religious speakers who shouted at the sea, as though it were wicked and wrong to roll in and out like that, white-horsed and full of fishes.

Yes, I'm the one who washes the plates and glasses They call me an easy woman When they give me a penny I still have to say thank you Here I am, in ragged clothes At the bottom of this shabby hotel Today, you don't know who I am Today, you don't know who I am But one evening, one beautiful evening A big commotion People running along the shore Saying: "Look who's coming!" And me, I'll smile for the first time They'll say: "You, you're smiling now?" A big ship A hundred cannons at the portholes Will enter the harbour! I'll always be washing The glasses and plates I'll always be an "easy woman" When they give me a penny I'll always say thank you I'll keep my ragged clothes At the bottom of this shabby hotel And tomorrow, tomorrow like today You'll never know who I am! But one evening, that beautiful evening for which I live Look how the cannons Wake up and turn For the first time, I'll burst out laughing "What, brat, you have the heart to laugh?" That big ship A hundred cannons at the portholes Will bombard the harbour! Then the sailors will come to sure More than a hundred, they'll mark with a cross of blood Every house, every door And it's before me that will be brought Enchained, imploring, mutilated and bloodied Your kind, all your kind, fine gentlemen! Your kind, all your kind, fine gentlemen! Then the one I'm waiting for will appear, he'll say to me: "What is it that you want from all these people I'm killing?" And I'll sweetly reply: "Kill them all! For each head that falls I'll clap my hands, here we go! And that big ship, Far from the city where everything will be dead Will carry me towards life!

Banalata Sen Jibananda Das. Translated from the original Bengali by Amitabha Mukerjee A thousand years I have walked these paths, From the harbour at Malacca in the dark of night To the straits of Ceylon at glimmer of dawn. Much have I travelled - The grey world of Ashoka-Bimbisara, Further yet, The dark city of Vidharbha; Around me life foams its stormy breath. Weary of soul, I found a moment's respite in her presence - She: Banalata Sen of Natore. Her hair the ancient darkness of Vidisha, Face a sculpture from Sravasthi. A sailor in distant oceans, rudderless, lost, When hoves into view Island of grass through fronds of cinnamon, A green relief So she felt to me. In the darkness she spoke - "All these years, where had you been?" Her eyebrows arched like the soaring wings of a bird - She: Banalata Sen of Natore. With the sound of dewdrops, Comes evening. The sunset fringe of gold on the eagle's wing Melts into the night And the glow of fireflies. Birds return to nest - The shop of life Shuttered for the day. Left behind in the darkness Face to face - Only she: Banalata Sen of Natore. Original translation 11/90

It was something I simply couldn’t fathom … what type of person would shoot a terrified teenage elephant, and a female at that? For a tawdry fireside trophy? For the pleasure of the kill? And what kind of reserve owner would hawk a vulnerable young animal for such a reason? I have never had a problem with hunting for the pot. Every living thing on this planet hunts for sustenance one way or the other, from the mighty microbe upwards. Survival of the fittest is, like it or not, the way of this world. But hunting for pleasure, killing only for the thrill of it, is to me an anathema. I have met plenty of trophy hunters. They are, of course, all naturalists; they all know and love the bush; and they all justify their action in conservation speak, peppered with all the right buzz words. The truth is, though, that they harbour a hidden impulse to kill, which can only be satisfied by the violent death of another life form by their hand. And they will go to inordinate lengths to satisfy, and above all justify, this apparently irresistible urge. Besides, adding to the absurdity of their claims, there is not an animal alive that is even vaguely a match for today’s weaponry. The modern high-powered hunting rifle with telescopic sights puts paid to any argument about sportsmanship.

understand. Self-preservation should, quite rightly, eclipse any amorous feelings she harbours for me,” Varro argued, as he anxiously played with some dice in his hand and shuffled a little, in an attempt to sit more comfortably on the bench. He often carried the ivory, gold-spotted dice in his hands when he went out into the garden, read in the library or drank in the house. Sometimes he would practise rolling them, as he tried to devise a system of securing the score he desired. Just when he thought he had mastered a technique he would then throw several scores counter to his wishes. Good luck runs through one’s hands quicker than sand or water. The corners were becoming rounded and the gold was beginning to fade on the dice. But still he played on.  “Do you think it’s for the best, to send her away?” “I dare