I personally don’t like depressing subjects, people say, as if mortality is a lifestyle choice, disease and violence and sorrow a matter of taste.

I started to empty the dishwasher and then remembered that there was an alternative to my thoughts and turned on the radio. There had been more bombs in the places where there are bombs. Children had died. No one had started CPR and called an ambulance, no one had rushed to them with adrenaline and oxygen and a defibrillator, no one was piecing together what had happened. There had been bombs and children had died.

It is simply not possible to live in a state of acute fear and shock for more than a couple of weeks, and so the mind finds a path, a story, a way onwards. Shock is by definition transient, even when the shocking thing is here to stay.

Dad and the Prof were talking about fighting, the way men do when they’re really fighting about talking.

Stories have endings; that’s why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning in our lives. But like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison, a straight road mapped out by the people who went before. Stories are not the truth.

Suddenly, but not really. There is always a beginning.

It’s only, he said, that one doesn’t like to think of one’s grandchildren facing greater disadvantages than one’s children. Well stop voting Tory, you prick, Emma did not say.

I’m still broken, aren’t I? I guess I’m beginning to realise that I won’t get over it. Death doesn’t get better. Maybe life does.

Lights blind you; there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside.

The stories told by numbers and research are quite different from the stories we tell ourselves and each other. This is not to say that either is wrong.