Now that – that is bursting with flavour. I’m getting ginger, and then I’m getting lime coming in at the end there. That is a sensation. That is delicious. I could eat up the whole plate. Today I told myself I was going to have a positive day. Today was day one of My Big Week. I got up early …
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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.
‘It is not so much that we are splitting up that is really worrying me, it is the fact that she keeps quoting Martin Amis.’
‘I discover some rough skin on her elbow. I run my tongue along it’.
‘I realize with a fresh horror that Jonathan is seeing me as the sin’
‘What does that mean, vegan cheese? asks a lady who’d had no query about amuse-bouche.’
An extract from The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes.
‘These bored, frustrated and hungry animals appear as reluctant figures in some unsolvable puzzle, or as victims of a grand experiment whose original purpose is lost in time.’
