People Were Incredibly Kind To Our Family

Memory, I Realize, Can Be An Unreliable Thing; Often It Is Heavily Coloured By The Circumstances In Which One Remembers.

When We Lost Something Precious, And We'd Looked And Looked And Still Couldn't Find It, Then We Didn't Have To Be Completely Heartbroken. We Still Had That Last Bit Of Comfort, Thinking One Day, When We Grow Up, And We Were Free To Travel Around The Counry, We Would Always Go And Find It In Norfolk...and That's Why Years And Years Later, That Day Tommy And I Found Another Copy Of That Lost Tape Of Mine In A Town On The Norfolk Coast, We Didn't Just Think It Pretty Funny; We Both Felt Deep Down Some Tug, Some Old Wish To Believe Again In Something That Was Once Close To Our Hearts.

I Actually Dislike, More Than Many People, Working Through Literary Allusion. I Just Feel That There's Something A Bit Snobbish Or Elitist About That. I Don't Like It As A Reader, When I'm Reading Something. It's Not Just The Elitism Of It; It Jolts Me Out Of The Mode In Which I'm Reading. I've Immersed Myself In The World And Then When The Light Goes On I'm Supposed To Be Making Some Kind Of Literary Comparison To Another Text. I Find I'm Pulled Out Of My Kind Of Fictional World, I'm Asked To Use My Brain In A Different Kind Of Way. I Don't Like That.

It Never Occurred To Me That Our Lives, Until Then So Closely Interwoven, Could Unravel And Separate Over A Thing Like That. But The Fact Was, I Suppose, There Were Powerful Tides Tugging Us Apart By Then, And It Only Needed Something Like That To Finish The Task. If We'd Understood That Back Then-who Knows?-maybe We'd Have Kept A Tighter Hold Of One Another.

It Is One Of The Enjoyments Of Retirement That You Are Able To Drift Through The Day At Your Own Pace, Easy In The Knowledge That You Have Put Hard Work And Achievement Behind You.