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very upset?’ She replied, ‘Yes, I am but there’s no point moaning about it.’ She continued, ‘We bought a house together seven years ago and were planning to marry when we wanted children. I thought we loved each other and he liked to go out with his friends occasionally. It didn’t occur to me he was with another woman. Then last week he announcedhe’d found somebody else and wanted to sell the house and set up home with her. It was the most terrible shock. Ever since then I get myself drunk every night and I usually have a few drinks before I come to work and some more in my lunch hour. Right at this moment I can just about see what I’m typing, but I can’t crack up. I’ve got to get through this and drinking helps me.’
    At the end of the week nothing had altered for Michelle, who was still hiding her unhappiness with alcohol and idle chatter.
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    I took my time sheet into the agency on the Friday evening. My supervisor said, ‘You can’t go back there next week Sylvia because you are in your thirties and the girls you’re working with are all in their twenties. Their Personnel think it would be nicer if they had a younger temp.’

1983
A UNT M ILLY
    My aunt Milly was a prim and proper old lady of
seventy-four, despite having been married twice
and the mother of two adult sons. My mother was
seventy. I was thirty-eight. The three of us had a
night out together.
    A ll three of us decided to have an evening out and we chose to go to the cinema. As neither my mother nor my aunt had much idea of what film to see the selection was left to me. I picked a Monty Python film thinking it would make us all laugh. It certainly made my mother and me laugh but not my aunt, who sat in her seat in quiet disgust with a stony expression on her face all the way through the film.
    One particular tract of the film I guessed was a little too much for my aunt. Two men appeared on the screen and climbed into a cloth suit of a cow and hobbled around a field which, unfortunately for the man in the rear end of the cow, had a live bull in it. The bull didn’t realisethe cow was not real and galloped across the field and had sex with it. Immediately the bull had finished, the cloth cow made its escape and staggered out of the field. The man in the rear end stepped out of the suit and, after the violent thumping he had received from the bull, he was unable to walk properly. The lower half of his body appeared to be twisted and he winced as he walked with a pronounced limp. My mother and I thought the entire scene extremely funny and laughed our heads off. I turned to see my aunt’s reaction. She was sitting motionless in her seat, her eyes glued to the screen without even a flicker of a smile.
    After the film had ended we left the cinema and I drove all three of us home. My mother and I were still laughing about the man in the cloth suit but my aunt sat quietly in the car without making any comment.
    That was the last time I took aunt Milly to the cinema.

1983
G HALIB
    Ghalib was an Iraqi who had lived in London for twenty years. We met at badminton classes and became friends. He was forty-three. I was thirty-eight.
    G halib decided to emigrate to England from Iraq and he chose London as his home town. Unfortunately on his arrival in the UK he did not speak any English. He enrolled immediately in English lessons. He told me it was one year before he was fairly fluent and able to stop asking people to repeat themselves. He also told me of his first trip on the London Underground. He said, ‘I went down the tube to go on a fairly short journey and I got totally lost. It took me four hours to find my way out again.’
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    Some time later Ghalib entered into a disastrous three-year marriage with an English woman. He described the relationship to me saying, ‘Shestepped into my life, ruined it and then stepped out again.’
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    Ghalib also told me of a recent