The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth

Seventh rule of being a private eye: when faced with only two possibilities, both of which are hopeless, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to agonise over the decision.

No, the truth about love is this: if they’d missed the bus they would now be saying the same things about a person they met five minutes later on the Prom; their love was an accident; their lover just a nobody, gift-wrapped by their own imagination. There was nothing uncanny about it. They should have kept the drawbridge to their hearts closed; kept the moat free from weed.

A journey on a day that you could say was my idea of heaven.

Those fools, the poets, compare a girl in the bloom of youth to a flower. But that’s not right; flowers are too tough. A soap bubble would be better. A thing of wonder, too fragile to exist.

Every policeman knows the truth: there is no limit to the things that people will do to other people. And every torturer knows the way to make a man betray himself. It doesn’t matter how tough he is, how many torments he can endure on his own body, he can’t endure even the whisper of evil being done to his darling.

All men, if they are honest, are scared of the dark. The arrival of light, even a glimmer under the edge of a door, lifts the spirit in a way that can’t be described, because it dates back to a time before language. Hope returns, night terrors evaporate. You smile at the childishness of it all, the demons who haunted your sleep. It was just a dream.