‘The world is all mixed up these days, and America can no longer claim immunity.’
I’m sitting in the expansive spaces of Renzo Piano’s four-storey airport outside Osaka, sipping an Awake tea from Starbucks and waiting for my bus home. I’ve chosen to live in Japan for the past twenty years, and I know its rites as I know the way I need tea when feeling displaced, or to head …
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘The writer on place has to go further inward, into the realm of silence and nuance and personal enquiry.’
‘The immigrant’s dream – that he or she can make a better life for the children – becomes a kind of tragedy when it comes true.’
Pico Iyer and Caryl Phillips discuss migration, V. S. Naipaul and the meaning of home.
‘I was inside a silence that was not an absence of noise so much as the living presence of everything I habitually walked – or sleep-walked – past.’
‘You can throw yourself into any fantasy, she (and her country) might have been saying, so long as you don’t mistake it for real life.’
‘I get on the train to hear the funereal call of my boyhood: ‘Reading, Didcot Parkway, Oxford.’’
‘It’s when things fail to return to normal, that finally you get it: this is normal.’
Gary Indiana on growing older.
