David Sherman They smile so easily. Many are quick to embrace you as they would an old friend. Share a joke, a big laugh. We come each year, not to escape the cold or bask in the monumental cliffs, stormy seas or rolling hills, green and pocked with remnants of ancient homes and forgotten lives, grazing sheep and the occasional donkey. It’s about the people we’ve gotten to know and those we barely know. People who smile and joke and laugh despite the rigours of life. On the

Hmm. Occurs to me — or at least it did, a second or two ago — that there is something quietly, persistently insulting about the possibility that your entire conscious life is running on a tape delay. Not a charming delay, not the sort that makes things feel vintage or deliberate, but the cheap, invisible kind — the kind that reveals itself only when it’s too late to do anything about it. You are reading this sentence now. No — you just finished reading it. In fact, by the ti

It comes across as either a theorem or the beginning of your 19th nervous breakdown. “Infinity is the bipolar form of finitude” is just that kind of sentence. It arrives wearing the tie of mathematics but the slightly frantic smile of metaphysics. Crazy-ass wackadoodle. Flip city. Oh-they-used-to-laugh-at-me-when-I-refused-to-ride-on-all-those-double-decker-buses-all-because-there-was-no-driver-on-the-top certifiable. You suspect a sentence like that knows something you don’t