I can't believe it's actually happening. This is independent adulthood, this is what it feels like. Shouldn't there be some sort of ritual? In certain remote African tribes there'd be some incredible four day rites of passage ceremony involving tattooing and potent hallucinogenic drugs extracted from tree-frogs, and village elders smearing my body with monkey blood, but here,rites of passage is all about three new pairs of pants and stuffing your duvet in a bin-liner.

She made a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.

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

To have had fame, even very minor fame, and to have lost it, got older and maybe put on a little weight is a kind of living death.

...and once again Dexter is struck by how easy conversation can be when no-one is in their right mind

We're not ourselves, are we? I'm certainly not myself, not anymore. And you're not either. You don't seem yourself. Not as I remember you.

As soon as she'd met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her.