The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.

Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end.

That's what you get for ignoring the beauty of Tupperware.

The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic.

Newton's work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future.

And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.