He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.

And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who had started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.

But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer - a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight.