The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.

At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.

She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime.

No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.

Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?

None of us really either know the circumstances of our death or are likely to exert as much control over it as we would like to, but we can certainly have a little more say in it if we are terminally ill than we have at the moment. That's the element of dignity, but sure, life is very hard to organise even when you are fit and healthy.

She loved him, though not at this particular moment.