The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

The girls were expected to grow up to be somebody's wife. They were also expected to read and write, those being considered soft indoor jobs that were too fiddly for the boys.

This was not a fairy-tale castle and there was no such thing as a fairy-tale ending, but sometimes you could threaten to kick the handsome prince in the ham-and-eggs.

I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not 'celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet.

She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying to interfere with it.

I imagine that fish have no word for water.

I thought unicorns were more . . . Fluffy.