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Chapter 4.
In every life, we are constantly confronted with situations where a stranger will do something acutely irritating or discomforting: perhaps they’ll turn up their music too loudly on the train, or they’ll be wiggling their leg maddeningly next to us on the plane. Maybe they’ll assign us a room in…
When we are little, one of the first, and most boring, lessons we ever receive is in the primordial importance of being – as adults put it – ‘kind’. It’s because…
We tend to imagine that it must be within the context of a close and long-term sexual relationship that people are best placed to understand one another and reveal who they…
We have reduced it down to a trite error – ’worrying about what the neighbours think’ – as if this were a trap that only a mediocrity could ever fall into.…
For many of us, whenever we feel substantially scared, sad, anxious or lonely, the last thing we would ever think of doing is to share our distress; a confession threatens to…
Many of us, even the very kind ones, have a habit of walking through the world wearing a distinctly uncongenial and surly expression. If someone secretly photographed us on our way…
It’s one of the minor tragedies of social life that we make such rigid and unimaginative distinctions when defining the differences between ‘friends’ and ‘lovers’. When it comes to lovers, one…