Short Guitar Quotes

He's gawking at me when I open the door. "Damn girl," he says, looking me over, "what the hell are you trying to do to me?" I look down at myself, still trying to wake up the rest of the way and realize I'm in those tiny cotton white shorts and varsity tee with no bra on underneath. Oh my God, my nipples are like beacons shining through my shirt! I cross my arms over my chest and try not to look at him i the eyes when he helps himself the rest of the way inside. "I was going to tell you to get dressed," he goes on, grinning as he walks into the room carrying his bags and the guitar, "but really, you can go just like that if you want." I shake my head, hiding the smile creeping up on my face.

My guitar's name was Liz. As in, short for Elizabeth, Queen of England. She was a lady. Don't judge.

Whether it’s playing guitar or writing short stories or telling jokes or taking photos—whatever—amateurs are far more likely to think they are experts than actual experts are.

I asked about the price of the guitars, reminding him that if expected me to man the cash register, I’d need to know what to charge. He told me, 'There ain’t no set price on these babies. Take what the customer offers you. Even if it’s his soul.

She sank with an enormous sigh that carried all rigidity like a mythical fluid from her, down next to him; so weak she couldn't help him undress her; it took him 20 minutes, rolling, arranging her this way and that, as if she thought, he were some scaled-up, short-haired, poker-faced little girl with a Barbie doll. She may have fallen asleep once or twice. She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she'd come in on a sexual crescendo in progress, like a cut to a scene where the camera's already moving. Outside a fugue of guitars had begun, and she counted each electronic voice as it came in, till she reached six or so and recalled only three of the Paranoids played guitars; so others must be plugging in.

She stooped toward O.J. Berman, who, like many short men in the presence of tall women, had an aspiring mist in his eye.

After a short breather, Reiko crushed her cigarette out and picked her guitar up again. She played “Penny Lane,” “Blackbird,” “Julia,” “When I’m 64,” “Nowhere Man,” “And I Love Her,” and “Hey Jude.

Calvin sits up, jerking his guitar to stand on one thigh. “Mr. Okai.” He swallows. “I didn’t realize you were standing there.” “My niece tells me your name is Calvin.” Calvin looks between the two of us, working this out. Robert, with his smooth dark skin and meticulously short hair. Me: pale and freckled with a chaotic, weedy bun on top of my head. Robert reaches out a hand, and Calvin immediately takes it, standing. “Yes. Calvin McLoughlin.” This makes my uncle laugh, and the boom of it eases the line of Calvin’s shoulders. “That’s a pretty Irish name for someone with such a good tan.” “My mam is Greek,” he explains, and then looks back and forth between me and Robert again, as if asking a question of his own. Robert tilts his head to me, releasing Calvin’s hand and saying in turn, “I married her uncle.” Calvin smiles, quietly saying, “Ah.

The pieces in this book, then, are quite literally “speculative writing,” neither stories nor essays but something more like fables: compressed narratives, grounded in real experience and as true as they need to be, with little “morals” at the end. They move directly from what I have seen and experienced to what I think about it, from the particular to the general, with none of the recursiveness of ordinary essays and short stories.

Garcia had traded his Sears electric guitar for an acoustic model shortly after arriving in Palo Alto, and late that spring Barbara bought him a better guitar, and shortly after that, a lovely sounding Stella twelve-string.

Merrill Hartweiss scales a rocky incline toward Renna. The noon sun bakes the hillside as Merrill's boots dig into the broiling sands. Yet another gypsy tune enters his head. It starts off slowly. A lone guitar, its strings strummed with the lustful passion of a young man brushing his fingertips softly against the breasts of his lover. Another guitar joins, like a second hand, exploring her hot flesh, stroking the side of her bare abdomen, and gradually moving upward toward her chest. Then, a female voice joins the guitars; it is slightly raspy, yet sultry; filled with a fiery allure. The guitars pick up in intensity and tempo. There is a rhythmic clapping now, in synchronization with the strumming. The man has entered his lover. Sweat begins to form on Merrill's forehead, then quickly turns to vapor, dissipating into the blistering heat from the sunlight reflecting off the sands. Steady clapping, louder still. The tempo quickens, progressively and with a vigorous intensity. The man arches his back, cresting then falling; cresting, arching, rising and falling deeper again and again into his lover. The clapping, now faster, still rhythmic, but so much more intense. The guitars keep pace with increasing ferocity. In the woman's voice, short, quick breaths form words as she cries out her lover's name from deep within the throes of a forbidden love

He chose a guitar from one of the oak cabinets. Picking it with his calloused fingers, he squeezed his eyes shut and hummed. Something miraculous poured from his soul, riding in on a lonely train, rising softly from a distant place— a place I’d never been— then louder and louder it came, traveling through my ears, pulsing through my veins. I’d never heard anything like it. When he finished playing, he sat with the guitar cradled in his arms, waiting, the music traveling through the forgotten city of my soul.

As far as my part in it is concerned, it began one night in the fall of 1956 in Lexington, Kentucky, when I walked into the Zebra Bar--a musty, murky coal-hole of a place across Short Street from the Drake Hotel (IF YOU DUCK THE DRAKE YOUR A GOOSE!! read the peeling roadside billboard out on the edge of town)--walked in under a marquee that did, sure enough, declare the presence inside of one 'Little Enis,' and came upon this amazing little stud stomping around atop the bar, flailing away at one of those enormous old electric guitars that looked like an Oldsmobile in drag--left-handed!

The big problem here is that getting any young person with a short attention span to spend ten thousand hours doing something can be an uphill battle. That’s never been more true than these days when whatever kids do has to compete with so many attractive options. It can be surfing the Web, playing video games, tweeting, or Facebook. Back in my day, I confess that I played my fair share of Donkey Kong, but even than there was no Web for me to surf and I didn’t have a status. Well, yes I did, it just wasn’t posted anywhere yet. Whatever you want to do in this life, I’m here to encourage you not to lose hope or give up during the first hundred or so of those ten thousand hours that it takes to get good. You should know that in my case it took me a while to “get the bug” for guitar, as my grandpa used to call it. He always said it would happen, almost like a slow sickness. And he knew it would take time.

There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village. As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat toward the shore having caught quite a few big fish. The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?” The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.” “Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished. “This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said. The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?” The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and [when] evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink—we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.” The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman. “I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to São Paulo, where you can set up an HQ to manage your other branches.” The fisherman continues, “And after that?” The businessman laughs heartily. “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.” The fisherman asks, “And after that?” The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with [your] kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!” The fisherman was puzzled. “Isn’t that what I am doing now?

from Mad for It, a short story in the Asian Erotica anthology: And I didn’t leave California with my pockets full of gold. About 20k in the bank and an old Taylor guitar on my back. I chew on dowry for a week or two, but she doesn’t like delays. I came to Thailand because I can live in a bungalow near the beach, swim every day and eat mango, coconut and banana. Drink red wine. She locks herself in my bedroom and talks on her cellphone for hours. Comes out in a denim mini-skirt and heels and leaves me alone until midnight. I’m licking paint off the walls. She gets distant. Starts the going out thing a few times a week. I try to follow her once, but get lost in the mountains. I’m on a steep, dark incline. No streetlights. Weird sounds from the forest. A cool and ominous wind shakes the trees. I’m the only man on the planet. On the way down, I crash into a guard rail. Call her for help, but she doesn’t answer. I know she’s fucking around. But it feels like a way out. I didn’t come to Thailand to be a wingman.

INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTER ONE IN ONE PAGE The Four Villains of Decision Making 1. Danny Kahneman: “A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped.” • Should Shannon fire Clive? We form opinions effortlessly. 2. What’s in our spotlight = the most accessible information + our interpretation of that information. But that will rarely be all that we need to make a good decision. 3. Our decision “track record” isn’t great. Trusting our guts or conducting rigorous analysis won’t fix it. But a good process will. • Study: “Process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.” 4. We can defeat the four villains of decision making by learning to shift our spotlights. 5. Villain 1: Narrow framing (unduly limiting the options we consider)     •  HopeLab had five firms work simultaneously on stage 1; “Can I do this AND that?” 6. Villain 2: The confirmation bias (seeking out information that bolsters our beliefs) • The tone-deaf American Idol contestant … • Lovallo: “Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business.” 7. Villain 3: Short-term emotion (being swayed by emotions that will fade) • Intel’s Andy Grove got distance by asking, “What would our successors do?”     8. Villain 4: Overconfidence (having too much faith in our predictions) • “Four-piece groups with guitars, particularly, are finished.” 9. The pros-and-cons process won’t correct these problems. But the WRAP process will. • Joseph Priestley conquered all four villains. 10. To make better decisions, use the WRAP process: Widen Your Options. Reality-Test Your Assumptions. Attain Distance Before Deciding. Prepare to Be Wrong.

While this signifier can be difficult to pin down with precision, it can clearly be heard in the records of Duane Eddy and many other guitarists of the period. It usually involves a relatively nondistorted electric guitar timbre articulated with a strong attack and a melody played on the lower strings. Reverberation is ubiquitous, and almost equally common were echo, amplifier tremolo, and use of the guitar’s vibrato bar. This overall guitar sound is often called a Fender sound, but that is a bit misleading, since Gretsch guitars were equally specialized for the purpose, and many other brands were also used. What makes the twang guitar interesting in topical terms is that it not only signified the western topic but also was key to a linked set of genres that intersect one another in complex ways: western, spy, and surf. Because these were all signified by overlapping musical features and in turn resemble one another in some of their broader connotations, we could speak of a twang guitar continuum: a range of topics that coalesced only shortly before psychedelia and were cognate with it in a variety of ways. Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida point out that the twang guitar, often in a minor mode with a flat seventh, was a common factor between spaghetti western and Bond/spy scores in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I would add surf guitar to the list, with its sonic experimentation and general relationship to fun, escape, and exoticism: “[The twang guitar] probably owes some of its immediate success as a spy sound to its similarity with various pre-rock ‘Viennese intrigue’ sounds like Anton Karas’s Third Man zither licks (1949). But in the 1962–64 period that produced The Virginian (1962), Dr. No (1963) and Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), steely Fender guitar was well on its way to becoming an all-purpose excitement/adventure timbre” (Tagg and Clarida 2003, 367).

I am seventeen-years-old. The world is changing around me so rapidly that I worry I might never find my place in it. Just a few short years ago, I was so sure of everything. I loved boybands, and horses, drawing and playing my guitar. Then, almost overnight, nothing was certain anymore, and things I thought I knew to be true no longer were. It was as though I was a caterpillar, happy, learning and growing, and then without warning I began to transform into something else. There has been no chrysalis, though, no cocoon to hide away inside, safe, until I’m ready to reemerge into the world, new and fresh and complete. No, all of my transformations have taken place out in the open, in public, for all to see, and the process has been horrific.

A few years from now, far away from here, a young woman will be sitting on a sofa at a party. Everyone around will be dancing and drinking but his eyes will be glued to the television. It's just a short clip from concert by one of the country's most female performers right now. Her name is Maya Andersson, and the young man has always loved that name. How ordinary it sounds. He's never thought about her accent, has never reflected upon why it sound so familiar to hin, But now he sees her on television and she's singing a song about someone she loved,because it's hit birthday, and on the huge screen behind ger a photograph of him flashes up for moment. She knows no one will really see it, a thousand more images flash past right after it, she just inclided that particular photograph for her own sake. But he man on sofa recognizes it. Because he remembers fingertips and glances. Beer bottles on a worn bar counter and smoke in a silent forest. The way snow feels as it falls on your skin while a boy with sad eyes and a wild heart teaches you to skate. The man on the sofa pack almost nothing. He takes just a light bag and the case containing his bass guitar and travels to the next town on Maya's tour. He elbows past her security guard and almost gets knocked to the floor and he he calls out: "I knew him! I knew Benji! I loved him too!" Maya stops mid-stride. They look each other in the eye and see only him, the boy in the forest, sad and wild. "Do you play?" May asks. "I'm a bass player," he says. From then on he is her bass player. No one plays her songs like he does. No one else cries as much each night.

The fact is, whenever I made an overture to a woman, which I seldom did, even in my young days, I never really expected it to be entertained, or even noticed, despite certain instances of success, which I tended to regards as flukes, the result of misunderstanding, or dimness on the part of the woman and simple good fortune on mine. I’m not an immediately alluring specimen, having been, for a start, the runt of the litter. I’m short and stout, or better go the whole hog and say fat, with a big head and tiny feet. My hair is of a shade somewhere between wet rust and badly tarnished brass, and in damp weather, or when I’m by the seaside, clenches itself into curls that are as tight and dense as cauliflower florets and stubbornly resistant to fiercest combings. My skin – oh, my skin! – is a flaccid, moist, off-white integument, so that I look as if I had been blanched in the dark for a long time. Of my freckles I shall not speak

the shift from banjo to guitar played a significant role in the rise of blues: Banjos have very fast sound decay, which means that one has to play relatively quickly and cannot mimic the drawn-out contours of a vocal performance. The guitar has greater sustain, making it more appropriate for slow songs, and also has a warmer tone, making it more suitable for accompanying sentimental ballads or moaning hollers.

Besides, I’m not planning on being around much longer. Maybe a week. So this would just be a short period.” “Where are you going?” He ignores my question and rises, carries his cup to the trash, and pitches it in like a basketball player. When he returns I’ve made up my mind, but I still have a question. “You’re carrying around a lot of money,” I try, framing it as a statement. “Oh, that? Yeah. That’s my savings. It’s not that much, and it’s got to last me a while. I try not to spend any of it, but this seemed worth it,” he says with disarming frankness. I feel like a complete loser. He’s made enough to save. Mine’s gone as soon as it hits my guitar case. I’ll freely admit I’m lousy with money. Budgeting isn’t one of my strong points. “You didn’t have to buy me another coffee, Derek,” I start, but his smile stops me. “What?” He shakes his head. “Nothing.” “Really. What is it? What did I do?” “I like the way you say my name. That’s all.” Bam. Right cross to the jaw. With a hell of a follow-through. “How about giving it a try for a few hours, until lunchtime, and seeing how we do? If I’m wrong, I’ll make up the difference. What do you make by one on a weekday?” Damn him straight to hell for being so reasonable sounding. He could probably sell toasters to penguins. I calculate quickly. On a good day, maybe five dollars. Most of my money will come in the afternoon, maybe another whopping ten or fifteen bucks before it gets dark. “Usually?

A (diminished) minor b5 chord with an added b7 has the formula 1 b3 b5 b7 and generates the notes C Eb Gb Bb when built from the root note of C. This chord is named ‘Minor 7 flat 5’ or m7b5 for short. It also is common for m7b5 chords to be referred to as ‘half diminished’ chords.

I couldn’t fathom going up to my room, but I couldn’t sit in this silence anywhere in the house. I hurried upstairs to fetch my guitar, then walked into the basement to be alone and as close to hell as I could physically get on short notice.

larynx (pp. 352–354), and (2) smaller intrinsic muscles that control tension in the glottal vocal folds or that open and close the glottis. These smaller muscles insert on the thyroid, arytenoid, and corniculate cartilages. The opening or closing of the glottis involves rotational movements of the arytenoid cartilages. When you swallow, both sets of muscles work together to prevent food or drink from entering the glottis. Food is crushed and chewed into a pasty mass, known as a bolus, before being swallowed. Muscles of the neck and pharynx then elevate the larynx, bending the epiglottis over the glottis, so that the bolus can glide across the epiglottis rather than falling into the larynx. While this movement is under way, the glottis is closed. Foods or liquids that touch the vestibular folds or glottis trigger the coughing reflex. In a cough, the glottis is kept closed while the chest and abdominal muscles contract, compressing the lungs. When the glottis is opened suddenly, a blast of air from the trachea ejects material that blocks the entrance to the glottis. Sound Production How do you produce sounds? Air passing through your open glottis vibrates its vocal folds and produces sound waves. The pitch of the sound depends on the diameter, length, and tension in your vocal folds. The diameter and length are directly related to the size of your larynx. You control the tension by contracting voluntary muscles that reposition the arytenoid cartilages relative to the thyroid cartilage. When the distance increases, your vocal folds tense and the pitch rises. When the distance decreases, your vocal folds relax and the pitch falls. Children have slender, short vocal folds, so their voices tend to be high pitched. At puberty, the larynx of males enlarges much more than that of females. The vocal cords of an adult male are thicker and longer, so they produce lower tones than those of an adult female. Sound production at the larynx is called phonation (fo.-NA .-shun; phone, voice). Phonation is one part of speech production. Clear speech also requires articulation, the modification of those sounds by voluntary movements of other structures, such as the tongue, teeth, and lips to form words. In a stringed instrument, such as a guitar, the quality of the sound produced does not depend solely on the nature of the vibrating string. Rather, the entire instrument becomes involved as the walls vibrate and the composite sound echoes within the hollow body. Similar amplification and resonance take place within your pharynx, oral cavity, nasal cavity, and paranasal sinuses. The combination gives you the particular and distinctive sound of your voice. That sound changes when you have a sinus infection and your nasal cavity and paranasal sinuses are filled with mucus rather than air.

eggs and curried chicken salad and double fudge brownies. That was all she was good at: eating. In the summer the Castles, the Alistairs, and the Randolphs all went to the beach together. When they were younger, they would play flashlight tag, light a bonfire, and sing Beatles songs, with Mr. Randolph playing the guitar and Penny’s voice floating above everyone else’s. But at some point Demeter had stopped feeling comfortable in a bathing suit. She wore shorts and oversized T-shirts to the beach, and she wouldn’t go in the water, wouldn’t walk with Penny to look for shells, wouldn’t throw the Frisbee with Hobby and Jake. The other three kids always tried to include Demeter, which was more humiliating, somehow, than if they’d just ignored her. They were earnest in their pursuit of her attention, but Demeter suspected this was their parents’ doing. Mr. Randolph might have offered Jake a twenty-dollar bribe to be nice to Demeter because Al Castle was an old friend. Hobby and Penny were nice to her because they felt sorry for her. Or maybe Hobby and Penny and Jake all had a bet going about who would be the one to break through Demeter’s Teflon shield. She was a game to them. In the fall there were football parties at the Alistairs’ house, during which the adults and Hobby and Jake watched the Patriots, Penny listened to music on her headphones, and Demeter dug into Zoe Alistair’s white chicken chili and topped it with a double spoonful of sour cream. In the winter there were weekends at Stowe. Al and Lynne Castle owned a condo near the mountain, and Demeter had learned to ski as a child. According to her parents, she used to careen down the black-diamond trails without a moment’s hesitation. But by the time they went to Vermont with the Alistairs and the Randolphs, Demeter refused to get on skis at all. She sat in the lodge and drank hot chocolate until the rest of the gang came clomping in after their runs, rosy-cheeked and winded. And then the ski weekends, at least, had stopped happening, because Hobby had basketball and Penny and Jake were in the school musical, which meant rehearsals night and day. Demeter thought back to all those springs, summers, falls, and winters with Hobby and Penny and Jake, and she wondered how her parents could have put her through such exquisite torture. Hobby and Penny and Jake were all exceptional children, while Demeter was seventy pounds overweight, which sank her self-esteem, which led to her getting mediocre grades when she was smart enough for A’s and killed her chances of landing the part of Rizzo in Grease, even though she was a gifted actress. Hobby was in a coma. Her mother was on the phone. She kept

I HAVEN’T HAD the Dream in a long time. But it’s back. And it’s changed. It does not begin as it always has, with the chase. The woods. The mad swooping of the griffins and the charge of the hose-beaked vromaski. The volcano about to erupt. The woman calling my name. The rift that opens in the ground before me. The fall into the void. The fall, where it always ends. Not this time. This time, these things are behind me. This time, it begins at the bottom. I am outside my own body. I am in a nanosecond frozen in time. I feel no pain. I feel nothing. I see someone below, twisted and motionless. The person is Jack. Jack of the Dream. But being outside it, I see that the body is not mine. Not the same face. As if, in these Dreams, I have been dwelling inside a stranger. I see small woodland creatures, fallen and motionless, strewn around the body. The earth shakes. High above, griffins cackle. Water trickles beneath the body now. It pools around the head and hips. And the nanosecond ends. The scene changes. I am no longer outside the body but in. Deep in. The shock of reentry is white-hot. It paralyzes every molecule, short-circuiting my senses. Sight, touch, hearing—all of them join in one huge barbaric scream of STOP. The water fills my ear, trickles down my neck and chest. It freezes and pricks. It soothes and heals. It is taking hold of the pain, drawing it away. Drawing out death and bringing life. I breathe. My flattened body inflates. I see. Smell. Hear. I am aware of the soil ground into my skin, the carcasses all around, the black clouds lowering overhead. The thunder and shaking of the earth. I blink the grit from my eyes and struggle to rise. I have fallen into a crevice. The cracked earth is a vertical wall before me. And the wall contains a hole, a kind of door into the earth. I see dim light within. I stand on shaking legs. I feel the snap of shattered bones knitting themselves together. One step. Two. With each it becomes easier. Entering the hole, I hear music. The Song of the Heptakiklos. The sound that seems to play my soul like a guitar. I draw near the light. It is inside a vast, round room, an underground chamber. I enter, lifted on a column of air. At the other side I see someone hunched over. The white lambda in his hair flashes in the reflected torch fire. I call to him and he turns. He looks like me. Beside him is an enormous satchel, full to bursting. Behind him is the Heptakiklos. Seven round indentations in the earth. All empty.

Under the name The Waterson Family, they made their recording debut for Topic, one of four upcoming acts on the showcase compilation Folk-Sound of Britain (1965). Dispensing with guitars and banjos, they hollered unadorned close harmonies into a stark, chapel-like hush. The consensus was that they ‘sounded traditional’, but in a way no other folk singers did at the time. It was the result of pure intuition: there was no calculation in their art. When Bert Lloyd once commented joyfully on their mixolydian harmonies, they had to resort to a dictionary. Later in 1965 the quartet gathered around the microphone set up in the Camden Town flat of Topic producer Bill Leader and exhaled the extraordinary sequence of songs known as Frost and Fire. In his capacity as an artistic director of Topic, Lloyd curated the album’s contents. Focusing on the theme of death, ritual sacrifice and resurrection, he subtitled it A Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs. The fourteen tracks are divided by calendrical seasons, and the four Watersons begin and end the album as midwinter wassailers, a custom popularised in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as groups of singers – ‘waits’ – made the rounds of the towns and villages, proffering a decorated bowl of spiced ale or wine and asking – in the form of a song, or ‘wassail’ – for a charitable donation. Midwinter comes shortly before the time of the first ploughing in preparation for the sowing of that year’s new crop, and the waits’ money, or food and drink, can be considered a form of benign sacrifice against the success of the next growth and harvest. The wassail-bowl’s rounds were often associated with the singing of Christmas carols.

Zachary looked down into the swirling morass that was his beer as the man walked onto the stage and started to play a solo piece, the band respectfully allowing him to start off his set by staking his claim. Zachary would give him staking his claim. He had his guitar nestling close by his side, as always, the leather of the case gently touching his calf, sending an almost erotic charge through his body every time he moved like the less than innocent brush of a future lover's hand on a bare arm.

She remembered a conversation she'd had with Ash. Tall and slightly awkward and cute and forever in need of a new songbook for his guitar. The chat hadn't been in the shop but in the hospital, when her mother was ill. Shortly after discovering she had ovarian cancer, she had needed surgery. Nora had taken her mum to see all the consultants at Bedford General Hospital, and she had held her mum's hand more in those few weeks than in all the rest of their relationship put together.