Jonathan Coe Quotes

I like the rain before it falls. of course there is no such thing, she said. That's why it's my favorite. Something can still make you happy, can't it, even if it isn't real.

Some people don't realize that a straight 'No' can be the kindest answer in the world.

Objectivity is just male subjectivity.

Yes - I've learned from my mistakes, and I'm sure I could repeat them perfectly.

Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds.

[...] words are tricky little bastards, and very rarely say what you want them to say [...]

I don't mind summer rain. In fact I like it. It's my favourite sort.' 'Your favourite sort of rain?' said Thea. I remember that she was frowning, and pondering these words, and then she announced: 'Well, I like the rain before it falls.

The plain fact is that she never really liked me, and never wanted me. I had been a mistake; and that, to some extent, is what I remain in my own eyes, to this day. The knowledge never goes, can never be undone. You just have to find a way to live with it.

The upshot was that she lost her religion - with a vengeance - and walked out on him, taking these three daughters with her. Faith, Hope and Brenda.

Am I the same person that I dream about?

...quando perdi qualcuno e questo qualcuno ti manca, tu soffri perché la persona assente si è trasformata in un essere immaginario: irreale. Ma il tuo desiderio di lei non è immaginario. Così è a quello che devi aggrapparti: al desiderio. Perché è reale.

Me gusta la lluvia antes de caer. Ya sé que no existe. Por eso es mi favorita. Porque no hace falta que algo sea de verdad para hacerte feliz, ¿no?.

Whatever else it throws at you, life will always have pleasures to offer. And we should take them

We say, ‘Shall we meet for a drink?’, as though drinking were the main end of the appointment, and the matter of company only incidental, we are so shy about admitting our need for one another. [...] We say, ‘Would you like to come for some coffee?’, as though it were less frightening to acknowledge that we are heavily dependent on mildly stimulating drinks, than to acknowledge that we are at all dependent on the companionship of other people.

There’s a fine line between forgetting an event, and suppressing the memory of it.

I was going to say 'my friend Stuart', but I suppose he's not a friend any more. I seem to have lost a number of friends in the last few years. I don't mean that I've fallen out with them, in any dramatic way. We've just decided not to stay in touch. And that's what it's been: a decision, a conscious decision, because it's not difficult to stay in touch with people nowadays, there are so many different ways of doing it. But as you get older, I think that some friendships start to feel increasingly redundant. You just find yourself asking, "What's the point?" And then you stop.

My daughter was right: young people do not notice the feelings of their parents, are not even aware that they have feelings, most of the time. They live in a blissful state of sociopathy, as far as their parents' emotions are concerned

[...] life only starts to make sense when you realize that sometimes - often - all the time - two completely contradictory ideas can be true. Everything that led up to you was wrong. Therefore, you should not have been born. But everything about you is right: you had to be born. You were inevitable.

What did she die of? The same thing that gets everybody in the end: a combination of circumstances,

.. cerca di non arrabbiarti troppo con chi pensa di conoscerti meglio di quanto tu conosca te stesso. Ha buone intenzioni.

In circumstances this desperate there is only one thing that can console me. I always keep at least three different kinds of Brie in the kitchen for emergency situations.

As you get older, the hopes get smaller and the regrets get bigger. The challenge is to fight it. To stop the regrets from taking over

You didn't take part, Benjamin?" Gunther asked, as he passed me a plate of cheese and cold meat. "My brother doesn't play games," said Paul. "He's an aesthete. He sat by the window all afternoon with a funny look on his face: probably composing a tone poem.

Yes, she would have been partial to men, perhaps she might even have confined herself to one man in particular, if only she had been able to find one who shared her view that intimacy between two people was of value irrespective of whether it led to sticky conflux.

Your gravity, your grace have turned a tide In me, no lunar power can reverse; But in your narcoleptic eyes I spied A sightlessness tonight: or something worse, A disregard that made me feel unmanned. Meanwhile, insomniac, I catch my breath To think I saw my future traced in sand One afternoon "as still, as carved, as death,” And pray for an oblivion so deep It ends in transformation. Only dawn Can save me, flood this haunted house of sleep With light, and drown the thoughts that nightly warn: Another lifetime is the least you’ll need, to trace The guarded secrets of her gravity, her grace.

it’s their own unplanned words, their own thoughtless gestures and inflections, which have clung to my memory like flies caught on flypaper.

Politics can make people do terrible things

Can you make her out at all?' Benjamin shrugged. As usual, in Cicely's presence, he was afraid of appearing inarticulate, and as usual, this fear robbed him of his power of speech.

[...] because there comes a point where greed and madness can no longer be told apart. This dividing line is very thin, just like a belt of film surrounding the earth's sphere. It's a delicate blue, and this transition from the blue to the black is very gradual and lovely.

So as well as hating you, they also hate them – whoever they are – these faceless people who are sitting in judgement over them somewhere, legislating on what they can and can’t say out loud.

You're right, Margaret, absolutely right. Things have changed a lot, even since I've been here. It's a different place now. Better in some ways, worse in others." "Better!" she echoed, scornfully.

Le auto sono come le persone. Ogni giorno andiamo in giro in mezzo alla ressa, corriamo di qua e di là, arrivando quasi a toccarci ma in realtà c'è pochissimo contatto. Tutti quegli scontri mancati. Tutte quelle opportunità perse. E' inquietante, a pensarci bene. Forse è meglio non pensarci affatto

Well, he and his wife had both been devout evangelicals for a while. They had these two kids and then she had an incredible job giving birth to the next one. The upshot was that she lost her religion - with a vengeance - and walked out on him, taking these three daughters with her. Faith, Hope and Brenda.

Half an hour later, as I was deeply immersed in the story of The Man of the Hill, that curious, lengthy digression which seems to have nothing to do with the main narrative but is in fact its cornerstone..

Billy might have known it for several months by now, and I might only just have begun to grasp it, but we had both come to the same realization: the realization that what we had to give, nobody really wanted any more

...he was the proud owner of a quite colossal member, which on the many awestruck occasions it had been exposed to public view had been compared variously to a giant frankfurter, an overfed python, a length of led piping, the trunk of a rogue elephant, a barrage balloon, an airport-sized Toblerone and a roll of wet wallpaper.

They sat and drank their pints. The tables in which their faces were dimly reflected were dark brown, the darkest brown, the colour of Bournville chocolate. The walls were a lighter brown, the colour of Dairy Milk. The carpet was brown, with little hexagons of a slightly different brown, if you looked closely. The ceiling was meant to be off-white, but was in fact brown, browned by the nicotine smoke of a million unfiltered cigarettes. Most of the cars in the car park were brown, as were most of the clothes worn by the patrons. Nobody in the pub really noticed the predominance of brown, or if they did, thought it worth remarking upon. These were brown times.

Live life as it was meant to be lived. Half asleep, preferably. [...] She preferred [...] to go to sleep at once, sleep now being one of the very few aspects of existence for which she felt any degree of enthusiasm [...]

These days, every politician is a laughing-stock, and the laughter which occasionally used to illuminate the dark corners of the political world with dazzling, unexpected shafts of hilarity has become an unthinking reflex on our part, a tired Pavlovian reaction to situations that are too difficult or too depressing to think about clearly.

As for human contact, I'd lost all appetite for it. Mankind has, as you may have noticed, become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other and I'd been taking full advantage of the most recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Rather than meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them all what a busy life I was leading. And presumably people had been enjoying them, because I'd got more than seventy friends on Facebook now, most of them complete strangers. But actual, face-to-face, let's-meet-for-a-coffee-and-catch-up sort of contact? I seemed to have forgotten what that was all about.

He waited in silence for the blindfold to be tied firmly at the back of his head. ‘Right,’ said Wilkins, emphatically. ‘That should do. How many fingers am I holding up?’ ‘Three,’ said Thomas. ‘God damn it to hell, how did you know that? Can you see through the cloth?’ ‘No. It was a guess.’ ‘Well you’re not supposed to guess. For crying out loud, I’m trying to make sure that you can’t see where we’re going. We’re not here to play guessing games. How many fingers am I holding up?’ ‘I’ve no idea. I can’t see a bloody thing.’ ‘Good. It was four, by the way. Not that it matters. Now shut up.

These pieces, he already realised, were merely stepping stones at the start of a journey towards something - some grand artefact, either musical, or literary, or filmic, or perhaps a combination of all three - towards which he knew he was advancing, slowly but with a steady, inexorable tread. Something which would enshrine his feelings for Cicely, and which she would perhaps hear, or read, or see in ten or twenty years' time, and suddenly realize, on her pulse, that it was created for her, intended for her, and that of all the boys who had swarmed around her like so many drones at school, Benjamin had been, without her having the wit to notice it, by far the purest in heart, by far the most gifted and giving. On that day the awareness of all she had missed, all she had lost, would finally break upon her in an instant, and she would weep; weep for her foolishness, and of the love that might have been between them. Of course, Benjamin could always just have spoken to her, gone up to her in the bus queue and asked her for a date. But this seemed to him, on the whole, the more satisfactory approach.

Don’t you know what a pussy is, sir?’ ‘Of course he doesn’t. He hasn’t even seen Basic Instinct.

If you sleep, if you dream, you must accept your dreams. It’s the role of the dreamer.

You shouldn’t take notice of anything that Henry tells you, you know,’ he now says, with a chilly smile. ‘After all, he is a politician.

Sometimes there can be more to life than making a profit, Dorothy.

You’re hiding from the world because it frightens you. I frighten you.

I live and breathe art”,’ said Phoebe. ‘ “What other people refer to as ‘the real world’ has always seemed pale and insipid by comparison”.

cuando Gill salió del coche aquella mañana tan fría, consciente de su ausencia definitiva, la invadió la mayor sensación de soledad que recordaba haber tenido nunca.

Forse c'è qualcosa di più intimo e segreto da scoprire nel volto di una persona addormentata che in un corpo nudo

Volare non è mai pericoloso, Michael" "Davvero?" "Davvero. E' schiantarsi che è pericoloso

This is the crazed, manic energy of the bull at the end of the fight, fatally wounded but ploughing ahead, driven only by pain and anger and the mindless will to go on living.

I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.

Take It and Like It

Obsessions, of course, can never be shared.

To the privileged, equality feels like a step down. Understand this and you understand a lot of populist politics today.’ İyad el-Baghdadi, Twitter, 1:36 p.m., 25 July 2016

We've got to squash this dewy-eyed belief that people can be motivated by anything other than money.

Like Hilary (who never watched her own television programmes), Dorothy had no intention of ever consuming the products which she was happy to foist upon an uncomplaining public.

If imagination's the lifeblood of the people and thought is our oxygen, then his job's to cut off our circulation and hers is to make sure that we all stay dead from the neck up.

Nobody gives a tinker’s fuck about fiction any more, not real fiction, and the only kind of … values anybody seems to care about are the ones that can be added up on a balance sheet.

Do you work out, Michael? Attend a gym, or anything like that?’ ‘No. Why do you ask?’ ‘It’s just that you have unusually firm buttocks. For a writer, that is. It was the first thing I noticed about you.

And so they sit at home, getting fat on the proceedings and here we all are. Our businesses are failing, our jobs disappearing, our countryside choking, our hospitals crumbling, our homes being repossessed, our bodies being poisoned, our minds shutting down, the whole bloody spirit of the country crushed and fighting for breath. I hate the Winshaws, Fiona. Just look what they've done to us. Look what they've done to you.

»Das Pub. Das Britannia. Ein uriges altes Wirtshaus, so britisch wie … der Bowlerhut und Fisch und Chips, stellvertretend für die beste Gastlichkeit, die unser Land zu bieten hat.« Mr Ellis erschauderte. »Die armen Belgier. Das wollen wir ihnen also zumuten, ja? Würstchen mit Kartoffelbrei und Schweinspastete von vorletzter Woche, heruntergespült mit einem Pint lauwarmes Bitter. Leute sind schon wegen weniger ausgewandert.«�

The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it...

Here I sat down and closed my eyes, tilting my face towards the sun and listening to the gentle lap of the blue water against the rocks. Perhaps it was my destiny, after all, to be always alone: that was the tragic, self-dramatizing thought that came to me, and in some paradoxical way it also brought me a kind of comfort, reconciling me to what seemed, at that moment, to be my essential nature: introverted, melancholy and solitary.

Mr Gardner remarked at this point that he would have thought twice about accepting this job if he had known that he was joining a sinking ship, and asked whose idea it had been to employ this bloody woman in the first place.

Well, there'll be an outcry, of course, but then it'll die down and something else will come along for people to get annoyed about. The important thing is that we save ourselves a lot of money, and meanwhile a whole generation of children from working-class or low-income families will be eating nothing but crisps and chocolate every day. Which means, in the end, that they'll grow up physically weaker and mentally slower.' Dorothy raised an eyebrow at this assertion. 'Oh, yes,' he assured her. 'A diet high in sugars lead to retarded brain growth. Our chaps have proved it.' He smiled. 'As every general knows, the secret of winning any war is to demoralize the enemy'.

For with every snatched glance (I was trying to keep my eyes on the road) I felt that I was being offered a glimpse of something new and unthinkable, something that I had been needlessly denying myself, now, for many years: a future.

Hilary’s reputation had preceded her, and she found that on her first day she did not receive much of a welcome from her new colleagues. Well, she thought: fuck them. She was only going to be coming in one or two days a week. If that.

It's a reminder that what is inevitable may also be spiritually unendurable, that what is justifiable may be atrocious . . . that, like our Mad Mother Nature, our Mad Father Society is an organization of deaths as well as of lives . . .

None of this made any sense to Benjamin, however hard he tried. Roll-Up Reg was talking another language. But then, he was no more persuaded by the things his parents told him, or the teachers at school. It was the world, the world itself that was beyond his reach, this whole absurdly vast, complex, random, measureless construct, this never-ending ebb and flow of human relations, political relations, cultures, histories . . . How could anyone hope to master such things? It was not like music. Music always made sense. The music he heard that night was lucid, knowable, full of intelligence and humour, wistfulness and energy and hope. He would never understand the world, but he would always love this music.

A volte mi sento come se fossi destinato a essere sempre dietro le quinte quando arriva una scena madre. Come se Dio mi avesse scelto come vittima di un cosmico tiro mancino, assegnandomi poco più di una comparsata nella mia vita. Altre volte mi sento come se non avessi altro role che quello dello spettatore di storie di altra gente e per di più fossi condannato a lasciare il mio posto sempre al momento cruciale, e andare in cucina a farmi una tazza di tea proprio quando arriva la resa dei conti

Gil waited, waited just a few more seconds before picking up and in that stretrched instant she felt the promise of revelation curl, evaporate and vanish; watched in despair as it slipped for ever through her mind's grasping fingers. Even before she heard her daughter's first, broken words, she knew that it was too late. The pattern she had been searching for had gone. Worse than that - it had never existed. How could it? What she had been hoping for was a figment, a dream an impossible thing: like the rain before it falls.

Aveva degli occhi azzurri penetranti e intelligenti che avrebbero certamente inchiodato i miei con la forza e la fissità del loro sguardo, se io non li avessi deliberatamente evitati, preferendo soffermarmi sulla carnagione leggermente screziata e sui suoi folti capelli ramati.

Os carros são como as pessoas. Movemo-nos em círculos todos os dias, corremos daqui para ali, passamos a centímetros uns dos outros, mas há muito pouco contacto real. Tantos desencontros. Tantos «podia ter sido». É assustador, quando pensamos nisso. Provavelmente, o melhor é não pensar.

There was the outside world, the world of politics and history, and there was my inside world, the world of music and family, and the two worlds never met. In the outside world there was economic stagnation and military rule and political censorship and people being tortured and sent away to concentration camps; in my inside world there was music and laughter, there were home comforts and good food and the warm glow of the unconditional love my parents felt for each other and for me. I lived in a little bubble of happiness and paid hardly any attention to what was going on around me.

¿Conoce esa sensación? Seguro que sí: tropezarse con un artista cuyo trabajo te habla tan directamente que es como si los dos compartieran el mismo lenguaje cómplice, y eso a la vez te reafirmara en lo que siempre has pensado y te dijera algo completamente nuevo. (...) ¿No la ha sentido, entonces?

Una foto no es mucha cosa, la verdad. Sólo puede capturar un momento entre millones de momentos de la vida de una persona, o de la vida de una casa. Pero estas fotos que tengo delante, las que pretendo describirte..., Tienen cierto valor, creo, aunque sólo sea porque me ayudan a recordar. Son la prueba de que las cosas de las que me acuerdo (o algunas de esas cosas, por lo menos) sucedieron de verdad y no son vagos recuerdos, ni fantasías, ni imaginaciones. ¿Pero qué pasa con los recuerdos de los que no hay fotos, ni prueba, ni confirmación posible? JONATHAN COE en “La lluvia antes de caer”.

Take that bike ride I went on the other week. Agony, it was. Complete bloody agony. But at least I met some people, went for a drink afterwards, got a couple of dinner invitations out of it. It may not sound like very much, but after a while you realize … there’s nothing worse than being on your own. Nothing.

Το κόλπο είναι να κάνεις πάντα σκανδαλώδη πράγματα. Δεν υπάρχει λόγος να περνάς μια σκανδαλώδη νομοθεσία και μετά να δίνεις στους άλλους το χρόνο να προετοιμαστούν σχετικά. Πρέπει να παρεμβαίνεις αμέσως και να την επικαλύπτεις με κάτι ακόμα χειρότερο, προτού η κοινή γνώμη προλάβει να καταλάβει το κακό που τη βρήκε.

[...] these questions gave way, in the course of time, to a different preoccupation, namely, a slow and growing awareness of familiarity with the landscape into which she was being carried. A familiarity based not on the sighting of particular landmarks, but on her feeling that the very contours of the hills and fields, and the very shapes and colours of the buildings, now appeared as surviving monuments to the existence of a much earlier self whom she had long forgotten. She knew, of course, that they could not bring that self back to life, perish the thought, but they reminded her of it in a way which she did not find disagreeable.

… Did they have the same worries that I had, these absurd people? Did they have the sort of feelings I would even understand? It wasn’t enough to say that they came from a different walk of life. It was more extreme, more final than that: they belonged to a different genre of existence altogether. One which actually horrified me …

Above all, she wondered why anyone would react to the global spread of a virus by buying almost two hundred rolls of toilet paper. Was this really people’s darkest fear: that one day, because of a terrible economic crisis, or a crisis of public health, or the onset of climate catastrophe, they might not be able to wipe their bottoms?

E così loro stanno tranquilli nelle loro case a rimpinguare profitti, e noi siamo tutti qui. I nostri affari sono un fallimento, i posti di lavoro si assottigliano, gli ospedali vanno a pezzi, le campagne sono allo stremo, le nostre case confiscate, i nostri corpi avvelenati, le nostre menti all'ammasso, tutto lo spirito vitale del paese è straziato, ridotto all'ultimo respiro

A disease, Terry - the most widespread and life-curtailing disease of all! Forget cancer, forget multiple sclerosis, forget AIDS. If you spend eight hours a day in bed, then sleep is shortening your life by a third! That's the equivalent of dying at the age of fifty - and it's happening to all of us. This is more than just a disease: this is a plague! And none of us is immune, you realize.

This book is full of passion. Full of anger, anyway. If it communicates anything at all, it's how much I hate these people, how evil they are, how much they've spoiled everything, with their vested interests and their influence and their privilege and their stranglehold on all the centres of power; how they've got us all cornered, how they've pretty well carved up the whole bloody country between them.

It quite spoiled my war.' 'You say that almost as if you'd been enjoying it,' said Michael. 'But of course I was enjoying it,' said Tabitha, smiling. 'We all were. It's so hard for you young people to understand, I know, but there's nothing like a good war for pulling a country together. Everyone was so nice to each other, for a while. Everything that had divided us suddenly seemed so petty and inconsequential.

Well, I thought you might want to listen to this. I mean, I thought you might be . . . ready for it. "I don't know if you remember, but just before . . . just before Malcolm died, he took me to see a concert in the town. We went to Barbarella's, and we heard all these weird bands. You remember the kind of music he used to like? Well, the people who made this record were playing that night, and they were his favourite. He liked them more than anyone. And I thought that if you heard it, it might remind you . . . might help you to think a bit about the kind of person he was. "And there's another reason too. You see the title of the record? It's called The Rotters' Club. "The Rotters' Club: that's us, Lois, isn't it? Do you see? That's what they used to call us, at school. Bent Rotter, and Lowest Rotter. We're The Rotters' Club. You and me. Not Paul. Just you and me. "I think this record was meant for us, you see. Malcolm never got to hear it, but I think he . . . knows about it, if that doesn't sound too silly. And now it's his gift, to you and me. From - wherever he is. "I don't know if that makes any sense. "Anyway. "I'll just leave it on the table here. "Have a listen, if you feel like it. "I've got to go now. "I've got to go, Lois. "I've got to go.

Benjamin had not dared, yet, to enquire about sales figures; as for the book's critical reception, it was non-existent. No reviews in either the national or local papers, of course, nothing on the various readers' websites and no reader reviews on Amazon - where it had a sales raking of 743,926 (or, if he wanted to cheer himself up, 493 in Bestsellers>Fiction>Literary Fiction>Autobiographical Fiction>Romance>Obsession).

Language is a traitor, a double agent who sleeps across borders without warning in the dead of night. It is a heavy snowfall in a foreign country, which hides the shapes and contours of reality beneath a cloak of nebulous whiteness. It is a crippled dog, never quite able to perform the tricks we ask of it. It is a ginger biscuit, dunked for too long in the tea of our expectations, crumbling and dissolving into nothingness. It is a lost continent.

Noi diciamo sempre "Andiamo a bere qualcosa?" come se l'atto del bere fosse il fine principale dell'appuntamento e la compagnia dell'altro un fattore meramente incidentale, tanto siamo timorosi di ammettere il nostro bisogno del prossimo. [...] Noi diciamo sempre "Vuoi salire a prendere un caffè?" come se fosse meno spaventoso riconoscere di essere dipendenti dalle bevande blandamente stimolanti piuttosto che ammettere di essere del tutto dipendenti dalla compagnia di altre persone.

In this regard it had already been noticed by several members of her family that her attitude towards the male sex was characterized at best by indifference and at worst by aversion: the lack of interest with which she received the approaches of her occasional suitors was matched only by her passionate attachment and devotion to Godfrey – who was, as the few reports and surviving photographs testify, by far the gayest, most handsome, most dynamic and generally prepossessing of the five brothers and sisters.

There was this sort of – empty space, inside me, where I used to paint, and I was looking for something to fill it: someone, I should say, because I was longing just to find a picture – any picture – which would leap out at me and suddenly … connect. Do you know that feeling? You must do: coming across an artist whose work speaks to you so directly, it’s as if you both understand the same private language – somehow confirming everything you’ve ever thought and at the same time saying something completely new.

Από το κέντρο του κάθε τραπεζιού, μετακινήθηκε ένα μικρό κυκλικό κομμάτι, σαν καταπακτή, από χέρια που ήταν στην αρχή ορατά• και μέσα από κάθε άνοιγμα που δημιουργήθηκε, εμφανίστηκε ένα αντρικό κεφάλι. Εξήντα διαφορετικά αντρικά κεφάλια σε εξήντα διαφορετικά τραπέζια. Τα σώματά τους παρέμεναν κάτω από τα τραπέζια, αόρατα. (...) «Καλησπέρα σας», είπε το κεφάλι. «Λέγομαι Ντόριαν και θα είμαι το ζωντανό μενού σας απόψε. Θα βρίσκομαι εδώ όλο το βράδυ, για να σας μιλήσω για το φαγητό και για να σας απαντήσω σε οποιαδήποτε ερώτηση έχετε σχετικα μ’αυτό. Φοβάμαι πως δεν μπορώ να σας μιλήσω για κανένα άλλο θέμα. Ούτε, δυστυχώς, μου επιτρέπεται να φάω ή να πιω οτιδήποτε από τα νόστιμα πιάτα τα οποία θα σας παρουσιάσω σε λίγο. Μη με λυπάστε πολύ, σας παρακαλώ, πληρώνομαι πολυ καλά για την αποψινή μου δουλειά και θα πάρω σπίτι μου μια γενναιόδωρη τσάντα με ό,τι περισσέψει. Λοιπόν, χωρίς καμία περαιτέρω καθυστέρηση, επιτρέψτε μοιυ να σας παρουσιάσω τα πρώτα πιάτα του αποψινού νόστιμου μπουφέ. Κυρίες και κύριοι, προετοιμάστε τον ουρανίσκο σας για μια επιλογή των εκπληκτικών ορεκτικών του σεφ μας!»

If there was one kind of hat Terry despised above all others, it was the baseball cap. There was nothing wrong with children wearing it, of course, but whenever he saw it on the head of an adult it seemed to symbolize everything that he most hated about America, even more potently than the figure of Mickey Mouse or the latest Coke adverts or the hordes of giant yellow ‘M’s which were even now beginning to advance across Britain like an unchecked virus. And even worse, Kingsley was wearing it back to front. This, without doubt, was the ultimate badge of imbecility.

In effetti a questo stadio della sua esistenza, Maria non era contraria per principio al bacio o allo strofinamento occasionale, o all'occasionale orgasmo. Ma più il tempo passava e più Maria cominciava a vedere le brame sessuali della razza umana, incluse le proprie, come il sintomo di una bramosia ben più grande, di una solitudine terribile, di un'urgenza di dimenticare se stessi che, così almeno si diceva in giro, poteva essere attenuata soltanto durante quell'atto tanto privato e particolare che tende ad aver luogo al piano di sopra, tra adulti consenzienti e con le tende tirate.

Growing up where she did, Beatrix had developed a romantic and adventurous nature, and she had no outlet for it any more. The happiest times I can remember spending with them were when we drove out - twice, I think - to the Long Mynd for a picnic. Roger had long since traded in his motorbike and scraped together enough money to buy a second-hand Morris Minor. Somehow we all squeezed into this (I seem to recall sitting in the front passenger seat, Beatrix sitting behind me with the baby on her lap) and drove out for the afternoon to those wonderful Shropshire hills. I wonder if you have ever walked on them yourself, Imogen. They are part of your story, you know. So many things have changed, changed beyond recognition, in the almost sixty years since the time I'm now recalling, but the Long Mynd is not one of them. In the last few months I have been too ill to walk there, but I did manage to visit in the last spring, to offer what I already sensed would be my final farewells. Places like this are important to me - to all of us - because they exist outside the normal timespan. You can stand on the backbone of the Long Mynd and not know if you are in the 1940s, the 2000s, the tenth or eleventh century... It is all immaterial, all irrelevant. The gorse and the purple heather are unchanging, and so are the sheeptracks which cut through them and criss-cross them, the twisted rocky outcrops which surprise you at every turn, the warm browns of the bracken, the distant greys of the conifer plantations, tucked far away down in secretive valleys. You cannot put a price on the sense of freedom and timelessness that is granted to you there, as you stand on the high ridge beneath a flawless sky of April blue and look across at the tame beauties of the English countryside, to the east, and to the west a hint of something stranger - the beginnings of the Welsh mountains

Hey - Duggie! Duggie! Duggie!" He came running up to me, sparkler in hand. I felt like sticking one on him, the cheeky bastard. Nobody called me Duggie. He held the sparkler up in front of my face and said, "Wait. Wait." I was already waiting. What else was there to do? "Here you are," he said. "Look! What's this?" At that precise moment, his sparkler fizzled out. I didn't say anything, so he supplied the answer himself. "The death of the socialist dream," he said. He giggled like a little maniac, and stared at me for a second or two before running off, and in that time I saw exactly the same thing I'd seen in Stubbs's eyes the day before. The same triumphalism, the same excitement, not because something new was being created, but because something was being destroyed. I thought about Phillip and his stupid rock symphony and I swear that my eyes pricked with tears. This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of the countless millennia into half an hour's worth of crappy riffs and chord changes suddenly seemed no more Quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity. Beautiful ideas, Dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of something beautiful in Philip's musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to happen. If there had ever been a time when it might have happened, that time was slipping away. The moment had passed. Goodbye to all that. Easy to be clever with hindsight, I know, but I was right, wasn't I? Look back on that night from the perspective of now, the closing weeks of the closing century of our second millennium - if the calendar of some esoteric and fast-disappearing religious sect counts for anything any more - and you have to admit that I was right. And so was Benjamin's brother, the little bastard, with his sparkler and his horrible grin and that nasty gleam of incipient victory in his twelve-year-old eyes. Goodbye to all that, he was saying. He'd worked it out already. He knew what the future held in store.

Martin never actually met Boris, not to have a proper conversation. Whenever he arrived at a bar Boris always seemed to have just left, and whenever Martin left a bar he was always told the next day that Boris arrived just after. Boris was always on the go, never still for a moment, always in a hurry, always in a mess, always late, always under-prepared, always over-committed, always in demand and always out of reach. ‘You never can pin him down,’ Martin was told by Stephen, who wrote for the Independent. ‘He makes his own rules. Then, if he decides he doesn’t like his own rules, he breaks them,’ said Tom, who wrote for The Times. ‘Life to him is simply one big cosmic joke,’ said Philip, who wrote for the Guardian. ‘He doesn’t take anything seriously.

What should it be called, this special place? You might have thought, for the people who named it, that with its almshouses and playing fields, its miniature boating lake and white-flannelled cricketers, the village was built as an archetype – a parody, almost – of a certain notion of Englishness. The little stream which wound through its very centre was called the Bourn, and many expected that Bournbrook would be the chosen name. But this was a village founded on enterprise, and that enterprise was to sell chocolate, and even in the hearts of the Cadburys, these pioneers of British chocolate manufacture, there lurked a residual sense of the inferiority of the native product, compared to its Continental rivals. Was there not something quintessentially, intrinsically European about the finest chocolate?