The fact that I feel so damned lonely must be proof that I married well. During sixty-six years there've been plenty of arguments but also plenty of agreements. Notably when VR - already a mother - agreed to share the adventure of uprooting ourselves from the suburb of Stoke Newington, from London, from England and from Europe and settle - for an unspecified length of time - in the USA. Where I knew nobody, would live unprotected by the NHS (National Health Service) in a sub-continent where more than two-thirds of the population had never owned a passport. A huge but parochial land mass.
Why? The immediate assumption, on both sides of the Atlantic, was that I intended to make my fortune. Not so, and I fear you'll just have to take my word for that. I was influenced, of course, but not so much by movies or by TV. Rather by Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, James Thurber, E. B. White, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard, Henry James, Anne Tyler, Dorothy Parker, H. L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, P. J. O'Rourke, Ross McDonald, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Lorenz Hart, Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, James Jones... Many more. Many re-read. Yup, folks, it was the writers who wove the web.
Two things kept me there. One I fear will sound like boasting but don't complain; aged ninety, I won't be boasting for much longer. Fact is I'm good at what I do and this was recognised. For which, many thanks.
Second: life as it is lived in the suburbs.This came as a surprise especially when VR gave birth. Suburbanites are, I suppose, in the majority and it's my opinion that this is where the USA's true heart lies. Take it or leave it.
And now we - the USA and I - are suffering; VR is in a nursing home and US suburbanites are being maltreated by a starkly mad salesman. I felt it was time to show that I cared.
Hence the tee-shirt bearing a single word. It's not a word that's as well-known in the UK as it is in the USA. And I haven't done it any favours by mirror-reversing it. But it's the eventuality we should all be hoping for. And, if that's your habit, praying for.