My parents believe in the happy endings to the stories of their children.

Nothing holds love together like shared vice or collusive perversion.

When I see gurgling retarded children (that's God's doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he's your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all - but I'm afraid he was rather an imbecile.

There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be doing with all that anymore.

Every present anger derives from past weakness.

One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death.

The flesh had infinity in it. I must know every inch by touch yet every inch renewed its mystery the instant my hand moved on. Delightful endless futility.