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He could still hear the sound of her screams. It had been the day the long nightmare had begun, but he had not known it as he strapped her into the pushchair and took her out for a walk. It was a warm spring day and he had not bothered to fight with her to get her mittens on--there was really no need for them now--and they had walked towards the seafront because little Liljana liked looking out to sea at the distant boats and the little white tips of the waves when the wind ruffled the surface of the water. It had been mercifully quiet, too early in the year for the tourists who would soon invade the beach like giant, beer-scented lobsters, and too early in the day for the children to start pouring out of their classrooms.

She had been so good that he remembered letting Liljana out of the pushchair so that she could toddle about along the craggy limestone, safely away from the water's edge. She had laughed uproariously when he chased after her and repeatedly pretended to stumble and fall over, but she had laughed a lot in those days.

I can't say I agree with everything C. S. Lewis writes in The Four Loves, particularly on the subject of women, but I found this quotation on a friend's Facebook profile ages ago and it still strikes a chord with me.

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. Not even an animal. Wrap it carefully with hobbies and luxuries, avoid all entanglements and keep it safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in the casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable".

I suppose it resonates so powerfully with me because I feel that my generation was brought up to be very cynical and emotionally detached from everything. At school, being passionate or sensitive was treated as though it were a character flaw that needed to be ironed out. The word my peers used was 'chill!' the older generation shrieked: "too dramatic!" Admirable people were calm, cold, more likely to greet the world with a sneer than a smile, the sort of people who 'didn't let anything get to them' and were safe behind their wall of ironic detachment. Mature people didn't let their feelings get a look in, they didn't even do foolish things like get married because it could be 'such a lonely and depressing existence' which presumably involved giving your heart to someone else and taking the risk it might be broken.

Looking back, I am grateful for my Maltese Catholic upbringing for ensuring that, when I faced two choices - a safe, heartless hinterland or the adventure of love with all its risks and struggles - that only one choice was ever possible.

Interview on

All right, this is unbelievably silly but I just can't resist posting this link to Pride and Prejudice told in .

The interview starts about one third of the way through.

Sorry, I know this is a couple of years old now, but it cracks me up every time. It also raises a serious point about the relationship between the way we speak (or even write) and the way we think. At university, I had a supervisor who used to hate what she called 'throat-clearing'. "It could be suggested under certain circumstances that the possibility remains that..." We were trained in the art of "say what you mean and say it like you mean it", presumably on the grounds that if you are so lacking in confidence about a point to fumble about that much, the point was probably not worth making in the first place.

I couldn't help thinking that the supervisor in question was picking up on a much bigger problem and that was the feeling that there was something inherently wrong in being certain about anything. The fashionable stance was always: "I'm not here to come up with answers, I'm here to ask questions" as though it takes courage to ask questions and none whatsoever to give a persuasive answer.

So, are we, like, the most inarticulate generation ever - or just, you know, the most uncertain?

from on .

My sister-in-law tells the story of how she went to an event where Seamus Heaney was reading and talking about his poetry. He talked about Digging a favourite of GCSE and A-Level syllabuses everywhere and explained how he came to write that powerful metaphor for a pen 'snug as a gun.' Here it is in context:

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun

Apparently, an audience full of men and women who had written school and university essays on the obvious reference to the Troubles, sat and squirmed as he explained that he wrote it because he thought it sounded nice. I can't even bring myself to look up the essay I wrote on Heaney during my final year at Cambridge. I know I devoted a very large number of words to exploring the hidden meaning of that particular poem. Sorry, Seamus. In fact, sorry Dr Rathmell (except, if I remember rightly, Dr R did not own a computer, so cannot read this apology).
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An excerpt of Poor Banished Children is available for preview on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ