And after tea, we play Junior Scrabble. We are the ideal nuclear family. We eat together, we play improving board games instead of watching televisio… - Nick Hornby

But I'd felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as you know where the money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid it at all. I'd spent it.

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.

By the early seventies I had become an Englishman — that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do.