selfishness

Today in a cafe two small incidents seemed to me to illustrate the forms of self-involvement that are more common to women, and to men. A man walked in and ordered a coffee at the counter. He wanted a latte, he wanted it skinny. It was takeaway and he went over to a table in […]

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He didn’t want to be President. Not if President means making sticky decisions, and being blamed for things (most of the world calls this ‘adult responsibility’), and being woken at four to read the papers.  What he wanted was to be Mr President. Good morning, Mr President! He wanted to star in the biggest ticker-tape […]

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Last year and the year before that and four years ago too we went down on the train to West Germany, to a tiny village lying under the skirts of the old woods. This is where my sweetheart was born. His father was born in the same house and to me the village, the house, […]

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Over breakfast my partner announced he is falling in love with another woman. I said, “What?” The omelettes had turned out so well. It was a cool, greyish day. I had asked why he kept heaving huge sighs. For a long time I could say just nothing. Then I asked a question, how can this […]

Philip Glass: a man who halfway through his own memoir, written by himself about his own life, can start a paragraph with: “But look at it from my point of view…” The innocent jostle of his ego crowds every page. He takes up plumbing as a day job in order to support his children, whose […]

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Seems to me when you have yourself a brow bar (they only do eyebrows), a blow-dry bar (they only dry hair), and a tanning salon (they brown people) in the one block, it could be your locality is suffering what we might call First World Problems Syndrome. Meanwhile, in Arnhem Land…