There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything. - Margaret Atwood

A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.

I’m losing the appetite for strangers. Once I would have focused on the excitement, the hazard; now it’s the mess, the bother. Getting your clothes off gracefully, always such an impossibility; thinking up what to say afterwards, without setting the echoes going in your head. Worse, the encounter with another set of particularities: the toenails, the ear-holes, the nosehairs. Perhaps at this age we return to the prudishness we had as children.

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.