Dinner in Camberwell with my angry sister. She arrived full of bitterness against the tax department, and against me for having lived on a supporting mother’s benefit when M was very small. Went to see Huston’s The Dead at the Rivoli. She fell asleep twenty minutes in. The middle-aged couple on my other side talked all the way through. When Gabriel sees his wife on the staircase, the bloke said, ‘Look at that wallpaper. It’s peeling.’ And during the great monologue at the end about the snow ‘faintly falling’ all over Ireland, the woman said, ‘Huh. Depressing. Bit depressing.’ All the way home I felt a violent hatred for common sense.