The Guest List
If you had asked me in 2020 I would have said four or five, and I would have said it with confidence, and I would have been wrong by a factor of three.
That is worth sitting with, because it happened to me and I am not a careless person.
When you make the same complaint over three years and nothing happens, the complaints do not accumulate in your memory as a record.
They accumulate as a feeling, and the feeling is embarrassment, and embarrassment compresses.
By 2020 the whole of it had folded down into one flat sentence — I did tell them and they didn’t do anything — and the eleven separate occasions on which I sat down and made myself write something had disappeared entirely.
They are not gone.