In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

If bureaugamy is the marriage of citizen to the bureaucratic state, then what we really have is an arranged marriage shotgun wedding.

I'm totally hacked off about having to work all weekend.

I felt the ground quaking beneath my feet.