fulselden

... Or, the opportunity to fade to black when it comes to stuff that isn’t sex.

Anecdote: something which annoys my younger brother consistently and entirely is the tendency my mother and I share for fading off midsentence. Because really, when we’re discussing for instance the way my grandmother would have absolutely slammed her way through the London social scene, if she hadn’t had a kid and gone to live in deepest Wales age twenty-five, well, what else is there to say but ‘...’

(My mother is that kid, yes.)

... And that of course, of course, is rubbish. There is a lot more to say! Responsible citizens have a duty to say it! And my brother, being a more combative person, for one, is frustrated that we’re leaving it unsaid. And he’s justifiably annoyed in that, as a conversational tactic, it’s a form of unthinking exclusion, for sure, just as much as when he and I chatter away about some geeky literary point in front of our-dad-the-scientist. But he’s also annoyed that we’re not just saying one thing. That we’re leaving our options open, fraying out. Is it laziness? Cliquishness? Complacency? What do we mean, he asks. What were we going to say?

Well. A lot of things. That’s the point.