‘Kinsella in His Hole’
The year we killed our teacher we were ten, going on eleven. Mitch went first, the terrier, a snappy article with a topknot tied with a tartan ribbon. The morning we saw him we hooted. He didn’t like us laughing and he flew to the end of his lead, and reared up snarling and drooling. ‘Hark at the rat,’ we said. Rose Cullan said: ‘Hark at Lucifer.’ He twisted, he screamed, his claws lashed out. The devil has several names and Lucifer is one. More
Memoir of an Only Child
I was born in 1980, the year China implemented the one-child policy: I don’t have siblings, and neither do my peers. Whenever a Westerner learns that I’m an only child, the facial expression is a give-away: ‘You must have been terribly spoiled’ or ‘You must have been terribly lonely.’ Stanley Hall, the pioneering child psychologist, referred to the condition as ‘a disease in itself’. Our generation were known as ‘little emperors’ here in China. More
Like Cold Oysters
Edith Piaf’s musical persona was highly, and brilliantly, constructed, however artless it was intended to seem. In private, she was amusing and loved practical jokes, but her act was devoid of irony. In her songs, she projected a stage mask of suffering, pain and deprivation which was all the more affecting because the audience knew that there was real suffering, pain and deprivation behind it. Her fans often remarked how ‘natural’ she was; how real. ‘With anyone else you have time to think that she’s singing well or badly. With Piaf, you undergo her,’ a critic wrote in 1950. More
The EU Referendum
What makes it so tempting to regard ‘Brexosis’ as a mental disorder is its persistent streak of paranoia. Brexotics have always regarded the EU as a deep-laid plot to undermine and eventually to extinguish the nation-state in general and Britain in particular; ‘they’ are always ganging up against ‘us’. Brexotics remain deaf to the thesis that the underlying purpose of the European Union was to retrieve the nation-state after two catastrophic world wars, and to anchor it in a network of institutions that would prevent beggar-my-neighbour policies. More
