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card was for his ex-girlfriend, and had been the hardest to choose. When you are actually going out with someone it is easy, you simply get the biggest and most expensive card in the shop, scribble a few florid words and a lot of Xs, stick it in the post, and there you are, the year’s work done. But how can a mere card, however tasteful, however well designed, express the complexity of your feelings towards a woman whom you have not seen, properly, for three years, a period almost equal to that for which you were (unofficially) engaged to her?
    In the end he settled for one of a snowman pulling a cracker with a rather dissipated-looking reindeer.
    How the precinct irked him, at this time of year. Not because it was too crowded (crowds were comforting) and not because Christmas had become, as any fool could see, a viciously exploitative commercial exercise (for how did it differ, in that respect, from any of society’s other festivals or holidays?). It was the atmosphere of enforced enjoyment which was so depressing, which gave rise, all around him, to a palpable mood of suppressed panic and desperation. People couldn’t just get away with being unhappy at Christmas. At any other time of year, fair enough, but if they were unhappy at Christmas then they knew, at heart, that they were irredeemably unhappy. Signs of this melancholy truth were on every other face.
    I dislike this mode of writing. You pretend to be transcribing your characters’ thoughts (by what special gift of insight?) when in fact they are merely your own, thinly disguised. The device is feeble, transparent, and leads to all sorts of grammatical clumsiness. So I shall try to confine myself, in future, to honest (honest!) narrative.
    Richard lived in a two-bedroomed flat, on the fourteenth floor of a tower block in the worst part of the city. He shared this flat with a friend, whose name was Miles. They were close friends, with several qualities in common, including laziness and intellectual snobbery. They were both students at the nearby university. (‘Nearby’! Sometimes I wonder why I don’t chuck this business in altogether and do something useful with my life. For is it likely, we have to ask, that they would be students at a university situated four hundred miles away?) Neither of them had lived in the city for long, or was native to the Midlands. Neither of them was now, or had recently been, involved in a close relationship with a member of the opposite sex.
    That evening, after Richard had posted the card to his ex-fiancée, with feelings of such a complicated nature, involving such nuanced shades of ambivalence and contrariety, that it would frankly bore the backside off the pair of us if I were to try describing them, he and Miles had an argument. They were watching the news, and an item came on about Northern Ireland. Some soldier had been blown to bits, or something, or two civilians had been cold-bloodedly slaughtered outside their own homes, or some woman had had to watch while her twin babes were hacked to death by terrorists. The precise nature of the incident is immaterial, as far as this story is concerned. Miles and Richard began to go over the pros and cons of the British military presence, familiar enough ground for both of them. After a while, though, the discussion became acrimonious, and they found themselves disagreeing fundamentally over the nature of the Irish conflict, Miles insisting that it was religious, Richard that it was political. Soon their conversation had ground to a childish stalemate.
    ‘There’s no point in my discussing this with you, anyway,’ said Richard. ‘Let’s have a cup of tea.’
    ‘What do you mean, there’s no point?’ said Miles, following him into the kitchen.
    ‘I mean that it’s always the same when we try to talk about religion. Every time, I come up against the stone wall of your bloody Catholicism.’
    ‘I see. So you think I’m bigoted.’
    ‘Of course not. Look, don’t take