I took Mum and Dad a copy of True Stories. ‘Errr,’ they said, looking at it with peculiar gingerly expressions. Dad said that the cover photo made me look old, and ‘didn’t do much’ for me at all. Then, while explaining to me how to sharpen a knife against a stone, he demonstrated with his blade across the smooth surface of my book’s cover, this chancing to be the flat object closest at hand. My niece and I shrieked about this later, but once more I’m winded by their ignorance of social forms—I mean, doesn’t one learn from life to say ‘Congratulations’? Whatever one might feel about the quality or significance of the achievement in question? Less and less do I understand them. They become more mysterious to me, with every passing year.