...and There Was Nothing To Do Except

At Twenty Life Was Like Wrestling An Octopus. Every Moment Mattered. At Thirty It Was A Walk In The Country. Most Of The Time Your Mind Was Somewhere Else. By The Time You Got To Seventy, It Was Probably Like Watching Snooker On The Telly.

Usually People Look At You When They're Talking To You. I Know That They're Working Out What I'm Thinking, But I Can't Tell What They're Thinking. It Is Like Being In A Room With A One-way Mirror In A Spy Film.

With English Literature, If You Do A Bit Of Shonky Spelling, No One Dies, But If You're Half-way Through A Maths Calculation And You Stick In An Extra Zero, Everything Just Crashes Into The Ravine.

Then He Asked If I Didn’t Like Things Changing. And I Said I Wouldn’t Mind Things Changing If I Became An Astronaut, For Example, Which Is One Of The Biggest Changes You Can Imagine, Apart From Becoming A Girl Or Dying.

I Better Make The Plot Good. I Wanted To Make It Grip People On The First Page And Have A Big Turning Point In The Middle, As There Is, And Construct The Whole Thing Like A Bit Of A Roller Coaster Ride...