Bokelskere.no

Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

The next day, when I was sober, I thought again about the three of us, and about time's many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.

But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions - and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives - then I plead guilty.

When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong.

And that's a life, isn't it? Some achievements and some disappointments.

I looked at him and found myself wondering if baldness was inherited - would be inherited.

In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travellers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard.

My bookshelves were more succesful with Veronica than my record collection. In those days, paperbacks came in their traditional liveries: orange Penguins for fiction, blue Pelicans for non-fiction. To have more blue than orange on your self was a proof of seriousness. And overall, I had enough of the right titles: Richard Hoggart, Steven Runciman, Huizinga, Eysenck, Empson ... plus Bishop John Robinson's Honest to God next to my Larry cartoon books. (...) Her own shelves held a lot of poetry, in volume and pamphlet form: Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, Stevie Smith, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes. There were Left Book Club editions of Orwell and Koestler, some calf-bound nineteenth-century novels, a couple of childhood Arthur Rackhams and her comfort book, I Capture the Castle.

And though we were making new friends ourselves, we were somehow persuaded that Adrian wasn't: that we three were still his nearest intimates, that he depended on us. Was this just to disguise the fact that we were dependent on him?

We wrote letters to one another, as people - even the young - did in those days.