Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal

‘We are together,’ she said. ‘That means you’ve got rights.’

Our conversations were like two people using phrasebooks to say things neither understands; you think you asked the way to the church, but it translates as ‘I need a safety pin for my hamster’.

The Winter’s Tale. My favourite Shakespeare play: an abandoned baby. A sick world which shall not be righted again if ‘that which is lost be not found’.
Read that line. Not ‘that which was lost’ or ‘has been lost’. Instead, ‘is lost’. The grammar shows us how serious is the loss. Something that happened a long time ago, yes – but not the past. This is the old present, the old loss still wounding each day.

Alice is losing patience. She throws down the map and shouts at Gertrude: ‘THIS IS THE WRONG ROAD.’
Gertrude drives on. She says, ‘Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it.’

The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate.

Paul would not have turned up at a nice birthday party, to which he had not been invited, wearing Grandad's gas mask.

And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you.

When you are a solitary child you find an imaginary friend.