Summerwater

by Sarah Moss

clichés wouldn’t be clichés if they weren’t true.

one of those English accents evolved to be audible from High Table or the bridge of a battleship or whatever position of command happens to be on hand,

Joining in, that’s what they’re after, a collective, a way of life that recognises people’s dependence on each other and the land.

as if you can spend enough on bath salts to cover the smell of self-loathing and repressed rage.

another prosperous and preposterous Englishman about how the world is ending because no one’s doing what the writer thinks they ought to do, learning obsolete words for insects or scrubbing floors on their hands and knees with wooden brushes or exposing babies to germs, usually something the writer imagines that women or the lower orders did before he was born.