“The night in question, I had put aside my perpetual lavatory read, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because of all the manuscripts (inedible green tomatoes) submitted to Cavendish-Redux, my new stable of champions. I suppose it was about eleven o'clock when I heard my front door being interfered with. Skinhead munchkins mug-or-treating?Cherry knockers? The wind?Next thing I knew, the door flew in off its ruddy hinges! I was thinking al-Queda, I was thinking ball lightning, but no. Down the hallway tramped what seemed like an entire rugby team, though the intruders numbered only three. (You'll notice, I am always attacked in threes.) "Timothy," pronounced the gargoyliest, "Cavendish, I presume. Caught with your cacks down.""My business hours are eleven to two, gentlemen," Bogart would have said, "with a three-hour break for lunch. Kindly leave." All I could do was blurt, "Oy! My door! My ruddy door!”

“Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”

“All the seats were taken, and I had to squeeze into a three-inch slot. I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. The Diagonal People.”

“Six hours later, when I returned, I was greeted at the door- and this before it was even opened -by the overpowering smell of vinegar. What were my neighbors thinking? That a douche-obsessed woman with a gigantic, three-foot vagina lived next door?”

“Ruddy hell, the cold smacked my face with an iron spade! Now I knew why northerners go in for beards, woad, and body grease.”

“I froze like a startled bunny. Fumbling the disk into my purse, I cut my eyes toward the hallway. Had I locked the front door? Of course I had. Only a moron would break into someone’s house and forget to lock the door. Damn it! I’d forgotten to lock the door.”

“Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. "Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There's a fackin' queue!"Never apologize, advises Lloyd George. Say it again, only this time, ruder. "I know there's a 'fackin' queue'! I already queued in it once and I am not going to queue in it again just because Nina Simone over there won't sell me a ruddy ticket!"A colored yeti in a clip-on uniform swooped. "Wassa bovver?""This old man here reckons his colostomy bag entitles him to jump the queue," said the skinhead, "and make racist slurs about the lady of Afro-Caribbean extraction in the advance-travel window."I couldn't believe I was hearing this.”