And then some days you wake up and everything's perfect

From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .

If you're my friend I should be able to talk to you but I can't, and if I can't talk to you, well, what is the point of you? Of us?

The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a different. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double-first, your passion and your new Smith Carona electric typewriter and work hard at ... something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. East sensibly. Stuff like that.

I think reality is over-rated

Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary.

She realises that if she is to save the show she is going to have to improvise a rousing speech, one of the many Henry V moments that make up her working life.