What Foolsmiddle-classgirls Are To Expect Other People

Why Can't People Be Both Flexible And Efficient?

Auntie Phyl's Last Months In The Care Home Were Extra Pieces. Age Is Unnecessary. Some Of Us, Like My Mother, Are Fortunate Enough To Die Swiftly And Suddenly, In Full Possession Of Our Faculties And Our Fate, But More And More Of Us Will Be Condemned To Linger, At The Mercy Of Anxious Or Indifferent Relatives, Careless Strangers, Unwanted Medical Interventions, Increasing Debility, Incontinence, Memory Loss. We Live Too Long, But, Like The Sibyl Hanging In Her Basket In The Cave At Cumae, We Find It Hard To Die.

How Extraordinary People Are, That They Get Themselves Into Such Situations Where They Go On Doing What They Dislike Doing, And Have No Need Or Obligation To Do, Simply Because It Seems To Be Expected.

Lord Knows What Incommunicable Small Terrors Infants Go Through, Unknown To All. We Disregard Them, We Say They Forget, Because They Have Not The Words To Make Us Remember. ... By The Time They Learn To Speak They Have Forgotten The Details Of Their Complaints, And So We Never Know. They Forget So Quickly, We Say, Because We Cannot Contemplate The Fact That They Never Forget.

Poverty, Therefore, Was Comparative. One Measured It By A Sliding Scale. One Was Always Poor, In Terms Of Those Who Were Richer.