but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.

What must that be like? To be admired before you’ve even said a word, to be desired two or three hundred times a day by people who have absolutely no idea what you’re like?

As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.

Call me sentimental, but there's no-one in the world that I'd like to see get dysentery more than you

Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you

Mortified at the speed with which intimacy evaporates.

This might sound really foolish, but when I came to Edinburgh in 1988 I had spent nearly all my life living south of Bristol, and I was just amazed that a city like Edinburgh was actually in the British isles.