‘If the pressure of their life didn’t kill her it made the fight too hard.’
It just wasn’t his strong suit. He hardly did it. He barely kept it, and as he got older he cared even less about the consequences of not doing his paperwork. It wasn’t a form of learnt absent-mindedness or elderly decline. It wasn’t a kind of shallow front or brittle bravado but a cussed indi…
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘Die Hel is a remote valley in the Swartburg Mountains of the south-western Cape.’
‘In our structures we South Africans tend to declare ourselves quite nakedly, sometimes eloquently, and rarely with dissimulation.’
‘There’s this paradoxical nostalgia where even though yi suffered, yi miss it.’
Memoir by Graeme Armstrong.
‘I don’t remember his face, nor him as a whole.’
Derek Owusu on fathers and family.
