I have three older sisters, so we were a reasonably large family and, in general, a happy one.

Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.

And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

I am capable of being idle.

To lose a child ... was something that could end one's world. One could never get back to how it was before. The stars went out. The moon disappeared. The birds became silent.

We all know that it is women who take the decisions, but we have to let men think that the decisions are theirs. It is an act of kindness on the part of women.