Activity

H: ‘Let’s take out hospital insurance.’

V: ‘Why.’

Pause.

H: ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s agree not to ask each other why in that aggressive way. Could we avoid that tone? Do you think? For the New Year?’

V: ‘Why is one of the most important words in the language. It’s an absolutely crucial …

With a friend who is married to a painter I compared notes about our respective husbands and their demands. In his determination to deter visitors, hers has disabled the buzzer and made adjustments to the heavy street door of their house that make it impossible for her to get in, even with her key,…

I think I’m searching everywhere for a model, someone to show me how to write a book about my widowed sister and her rage and grief. I don’t know where to stand, to write the story. Is it even ‘a story’? Where to grab hold of it. Whether to build this not-knowing into the story, or to blast a way t…

Opening at random Lichtenberg’s Aphorisms I note that V has put a mark in the margin beside this: ‘To excuse one’s own failings as being only human nature is, provided one has meant well, every writer’s first duty to himself.’ It is? I flip the pages, seeking more clues to his thoughts about himsel…

A manuscript by the music critic John Clare is studded with moments of electrifying power and beauty: Sydney’s ‘brassy, maritime light’; ‘a ferry walked on tiny spines of light’; two drunks wrestle in the Cross, and one stretches the other’s ‘cardigan a yard at least’; a man frenziedly about to fuc…