Of children as of procreation— the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable. - Evelyn Waugh

Instruction would be wasted on me. Just to give me the form and I'll sign on the dotted line.

It seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.

I go to Rome for Easter (Grand Hotel) to avoid the horrors of the English liturgy.