You're beautiful

She told me that she'd grown used to the noise of her neighbours through the wall. One played Michael Jackson all the time. The other cabaret, and when he played James Brown's You're Beautiful over and over - end to end, as she said, all day and all night - she assumed he was feeling low.

Only three removes

Today I am only three removes from Kafka, having talked to someone who has talked to a concert pianist - a Holocaust survivor - who used to know him (and didn't think him nice).

Listen

Abcde

She told us that, in her work as a doctor, she’d seen many young patients whose first names were Abcde. One patient might have been accidental, perhaps, or the first random find on an internet search; perhaps it was a joke, we thought, like the names Zoe Bowie and Telephone Booth, or a situation where migrants who didn’t speak English wrote the only five letters they had ever been taught. But the fact remains that there is more than one child called Abcde – and all of them white, she said, with Australian born parents. It had to be the fashion, we decided: la mode. Le chic.

The pronunciation, of course, is not straightforward.

In Africa

In Africa, he said, he didn’t have to wonder what to do with paper in the way he had to wonder what to do with it here – carrying it around in his bag, mostly – sometimes his mother carrying it – they all were carrying it – sometimes one of them carried the paper that the other person needed but couldn’t get until that person returned; he had missed appointments because the paper he needed was in somebody else’s bag; in Africa, he said, if anyone had paper, you took it and sold it for food.

Pens in their pockets

The night that Qirkz was closed down, it is said that the people who had been sent from the council to turn out the audience were identified by the way they wore shirts with pens in their pockets.

Nostulgia

At the conference, as soon as she pronounced the word nostalgia with a blunt ‘u’ in the middle – saying nostulgia, in this way, at least five or six times – I became too distracted to follow what she was saying.

About the birds

He was amazed, he told me, about the birds – about their complicated calls and the way they fly fast towards each other but never seem to collide. It was the first of a new kind of conversation with him. In all the years of my life until this moment, I was thinking, my father has never talked to me about the birds.