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told the stories that we choose to tell when people are new.
Little independent cinemas that sold coffee and carrot cake and showed foreign films about cruelty, poverty and grief; occasional nudity, frequent brutality. Why, I wondered, did people seek out portrayals of the very experiences that, in real life, would send them mad with despair? Shouldn’t art be an escape, a laugh, a comfort, a thrill? No, said Connie, exposure brought understanding. Only by confronting the worst traumas of life could you comprehend them and face them down, and off we’d trot to watch another play about man’s inhumanity to man.
Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.
The way you feel about friends or lovers or even siblings is dependent and conditional on their behaviour. With your children, that’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what they do. People with bratty kids don’t love them less, do they?’
insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly
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the usual mixture of rage, gossip, corruption, violence and bad weather.
