Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting

by Clare Pooley

“Perhaps she’s mean to puppies and follows Piers Morgan on Twitter.”

She raised one eyebrow at him—a facial feat that he’d always wanted to achieve, but had never managed, despite hours of practicing in front of a mirror.

so relatable unfortunately

Oh God, he did hope she wasn’t going to cry. Not on the train, surely? There were probably laws against that sort of behavior on public transport. If there weren’t, there should be.

All this beauty lay just a few miles from Sanjay’s home, and yet it was the first time he’d been here.

“No woman is anyone’s ‘other half.’ We are all entire people. Completely whole, and totally unique. But sometimes when you put two very different whole people together, a kind of magic, an alchemy, occurs. Bea said I was like eggs and sugar, and she was flour and butter, and when you mixed us together, we were more than just the combination of our ingredients, we were the whole damn cake.

Shakespeare, she’d discovered, never used four words when twenty-six would do.

“Way fewer,” said Iona. “Fewer, not less. Sorry, sorry, it’s just after decades of working with words I have a bit of an obsession with grammar.” “I couldn’t care fewer about grammar,” said Martha.