Berliner to Brisbaner, who has urged him to cross against the lights, at peak hour, right in the middle of the city: Ah no thanks. I don’t like jail walking. Not with so many police around. Brisbaner: (folds her face into his shirt feeling the weakness of language adoration take hold.)  

“I’m not racist or anything, but… [racist remark]” vs: “I’m not a feminist or anything, but [women are people too.]” Why is it still embedded in our use of language that we need to apologize for opposing hatred of women the same way we need to apologize for hating people of other races?  

Are ignorance & arrogance the same thing? I think they are. My friend and I argue. He says, ignorance goes inside, arrogance goes towards the outside. Yes I say; but as you destroy your ignorance, as you realize we are all connected and part of one another, it becomes impossible to be arrogant. (Arrogantly I […]

A German friend trying to understand a phone call from a Polish colleague just asked me could I stop typing… as I was rattling away at a fine old pace and it was very distracting. I learned to type on an old manual typewriter where you had to exert actual pressure to get the keys […]

On the lake, ducks and ducklings, geese and goslings, and a pair of swans bobbed about with the tiny grey morsels of fluff my dyslexic ex used to call ‘swanlings.’ “Look, Oel! A mamma and a pappa swan… and all the little swanlings.”  

Sauntered past the op shop where I bought some stuff yesterday, in the sun this afternoon, whilst wearing most of it. A lovely lady with white winged arms and white winged cheeks (a Twenties bob) was sitting out the front, resting and sunning herself. She showed me by gestures and impenetrable dialect, O! You look […]

Robert Peston’s preface to Sian Busby’s posthumously published last novel, as quoted in The Guardian. He transcribed the novel from her notes after his non-smoking wife had died of lung cancer. “My motive was selfish: I wanted to keep talking to her. I still do.” He writes: “Life became punctuated by terrible shocks and emergencies. […]

I have a cute, European friend who talks about money in the slang sense as “bugs.” This cost 75 bugs and the other was a steal at only 20 bugs. To talk about bucks of course makes no more sense: why would a male deer have more value than a bear, a bitch, a bison? […]