Sometimes, when I’m writing, there is nothing in my head except for sand dunes and sterility and if I try to drag a sentence from my mind and spread it on the paper it can seem as sullen as the sinking sun, exhausted, senile, spent.

Men play at life. They use important words like principles and duty, honour and beliefs. But women have to sort things out. Wrap up the sandwiches. Mend broken knees and broken hearts. Clean surfaces.

My thoughts are stale, I baby-step from humdrum this to dreary that with no sense of direction, trudging and prosaic, dead-brained, ordinary, dull. I need to put a match to these dry sticks, I need to flame some fireworks in my mind. But I can’t even smell the fuel.

Sons love mothers, mothers love their sons? It’s sentimental nonsense uttered only by the fools who purchase greeting cards and, in another and much darker sense, by Freudians.

School is boring. University? You must be joking. Three more years of boredom? Then you get a boring job and live a boring life. Die when you’re bored enough.

She loves her garden. Dad joked that she spent more time on her knees out there than in the church. She answered that she had her doubts about a God who had created bindweed.