Mortified at the speed with which intimacy evaporates.

I think you’re amazing,’ someone says to someone else, but it doesn’t matter who, because they’re all amazing really. People are amazing.

…and you smile back and try not to think about the fact that you have nothing, absolutely nothing, to say to each other.

Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead?

Emma was a shocking driver, simultaneously sloppy and petrified, and for the first fifty miles had been absent-mindedly driving with her spectacles on top of her contact lenses so that other traffic loomed menacingly out of nowhere like alien space cruisers.

At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.

You must do what you enjoy.