It's simple,' Kat told them. 'You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety.

Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen. He was infested, garbled, and I couldn't help him: it would take such time to heal, unearth him, scrape down to where he was true.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with.

It is not only the body that travels, Adam One used to say, it is also the Soul. And the end of one journey is the beginning of another.

Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.

A momentary psychotic break," I'd said. "The strain of being in a strange and debilitating environment, such as Canada, can have that effect.

But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down.

But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

How long do you expect me to wait while you cauterize your senses, one after another turning yourself to an impervious glass tower?

She says the clogs are comfortable, and that comfort trumps fashion as far as she's concerned. Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds Ãƒ¢Ã¢'¬Ã¢â‚¬œ who used to be a passionate Yeats fan Ãƒ¢Ã¢'¬Ã¢â‚¬œ is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different, and in actual fact Yeats is dead. Reynolds

And when I go that way, grow fur, start howling, scratch at your airwaves: no matter who I claim I am or how I love you, turn the key. Bar the window.