Pulse

Spiralling house prices, the market going mad: that’s what the papers said. Not that it touched this part of the country, or the property he dealt in. The market had bottomed out here long ago, the graph as horizontal as the sea

But in my experience, “hormones” is a catch-all word for when women don’t want to tell you something. I always think: hang on, haven’t men got hormones as well?

my mother pulls a face and my father frow

tasteful, tastefulness, tasteless, tastelessness – lead us into a world of minute diffe

iage for ten years; to his troops she was mascot, invigorator, nurse.

‘Her wishes … That remark, sir, is an impertinence.

A bottle of Gewürztraminer and tap water.

easy-going or quick-tempered, tolerant or severe, cheerful or depressive, sane or mad. That may sound a crude way of putting

I used the word ‘complicity’ a bit ago. I like the word. An unspoken understanding between two people, a kind of presense if you like. The first hint that you may be suited, before the nervous trudgery of finding out whether you ‘share the same interests’, or have the same metabolism, or are sexually compatible, or both want children, or however it is that we argue consciously about our uncon

strange’ did not mean ‘bizarre, hunchbacked, dribbling, goitred’ – or however we defined strangeness