Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

... we have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey?

IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn.

I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: Is there someone new?

What we forgot as children is that our parents are children, also. The child in them has not been satisfied or met or loved, often.

There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.