A kind of radiance

Aurally, she said, the flu had given everything around her a kind of radiance. That was one way of thinking of it. The other was to notice how this everything dispersed as it tried to get in to her past the over-whelming loudness, the ringing thick white, of her own ears.

A personal attack

She’d only been expressing her opinion, she told me – and not even her opinion but a passing observation – but when she’d said that toddlers with thick ears were destined to become market analysts, he had taken it as a personal attack even though he’d never had thick ears – as far as she knew – and nor did he work in the financial sector.