‘All you needed for the modern world was to know how to work a remote control.’
After all that nonsense at Heathrow, it came as particularly welcome to find himself upgraded to first class. This hadn’t happened to Alan before, and he looked around him with beady pleasure. Business class he was used to, club class and premium economy and what have you, the extra eight inches w…
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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.
‘The thing about a circular walk is that you end up where you started.’
‘He's the only person in the world who listens to me and does what I tell him (thought Zoe).’
‘There had been an unbelievable amount of talk about the weather, not to mention the end of the world and so on’.
The violence the retablos depict, the calamities of fate, weather, accidents or of illness, move us because they distil so powerfully what we already know all too well.
