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Chapter 3.
The best thing about physical maturity is that it’s very easy to spot; we can so easily tell when someone has another decade of growth to go – and can therefore set our expectations, and our levels of forbearance accordingly. But we have no such luxury when it comes to…
Some of the reason why adult life can be greyer and more miserable than it should be is that our earliest years are generally made up of a prolonged and highly…
There is perhaps no greater priority in childhood than to acquire an education: it’s in the early years that we have to push ourselves with special vigour to learn the lessons,…
We tend to begin our lives with a deeply unrepresentative experience: that of being surrounded by people who care to an extraordinary extent about us. We look up from the dreams…
When we first arrive on the earth, nothing is more alien to our minds than the idea of needing permission. We simply try to do whatever we want: when the carpet…
It’s natural to think of ourselves as a single person. We have – after all – only one body and answer to only one name. But inside our minds, we are…
Far more than we are inclined to accept and sometimes even realise, we are creatures of mood: that is, our sense of our value as human beings is prone to extraordinary…