I am full of how great life is. I am so happy to be alive. That the point of life, is joy - to make it, to receive it. That the earth is a treasure box of people and places and song, and that every day you can plunge your arms in and find a new, ridiculous, perfect delight.

…my biggest secret of all—the one I would rather die than tell, the one I wouldn’t even put in my diary—is that I really, truly, in my heart, want to be beautiful. I want to be beautiful so much—because it will keep me safe, and keep me lucky, and it’s too exhausting not to be.

…it is a million times easier to be cynical and wield a sword, then it is to be open-hearted and stand there, holding a balloon and a birthday cake, with the infinite potential to look foolish… . I haven’t yet learned the simplest and most important thing of all: the world is difficult, and we are all breakable. So just be kind.

It will never not be oddly touching that, of only four Beatles who ever existed, one of them (George) persistently gave off the aura of finding the whole affair extremely vexing and something infinitely less preferable to mowing the lawn of his mansion on his sit-on tractor while wearing a hat.

I am for the birds. I don’t care if I come back to a house that is empty, if I can step outside and find the sky full. In the hours where I wish to treat myself after I have paid my alms and given my thanks for good fortune - I skulk around websites, wondering if I’ll buy myself a pearl necklace, gold curtains, a pair of green brogues. But what I really want to do is buy myself birds - tens of birds, hundreds of birds. To greedily click on cuckoo, and sparrow, and finch, and thrush - to have a box arrive, by hatted courier, and to cut the knotted strings, and watch a cloud of them rise up, bursting, and fill my garden with the rightful things of a garden: feather and song; the crack of a snail on the stone; broken eggshell; the hymning of rain and sun. But my garden is empty. I am Gatsby, alone, melancholy - playing birdsong on my laptop, by birds that died a long, long time ago.

So. Yes. We’re all dying. We’re all crumbling into the void, one cell at a time. We are disintegrating like sugar cubes in champagne. But only women have to pretend it isn’t happening. Fifty-something men wander around with their guts flopped over their waistbands and their faces looking like a busted tramp’s mattress in an underpass. They sprout nasal hair and chasm-like wrinkles, and go ‘Ooof!’ whenever they stand up or sit down. men visibly age, every day — but women are supposed to stop the decline at around 37, 38, and live out the next 30 or 40 years in some magical bubble where their hair is still shiny and chestnut, their face unlined, their lips puffy, and their tits up on the top third of the ribcage.