People can be difficult

“After a time my acquaintance gave up his job and took a market garden, taking his son into partnership. I gather he and his son quarrelled about money and other things (the son called him senile, so I suppose was wanting to introduce new methods which his father didn’t approve of) so they parted and sadly are not yet reconciled.”

“I must go off now and support her while she has an old relation to coffee and a chat. The lady is a horror; lame with arthritis which she can’t help, deaf which she can’t help, but self-interested to a degree and the rest of the world can go hang – which perhaps she could do something about…”

“I’ve had a reply from him about the book. As expected, he objects to my book being published at all, but he didn’t give me specific information on what parts he considers to be libellous…”

“We are flying out on Saturday… X is going on Thursday. We are a bit upset as flying is very expensive and she is driving – much cheaper – only two days beforehand. We are sure there is no other reason than she could have thought that we could have gone together [but didn’t]…”

“The first two weeks my Bridge partner patiently explained to me where I had gone wrong whenever I went down and shouldn’t have done: but this last week, he eventually got very fed up and said with some heat, ‘I didn’t think much of the way you played that – or the board before for that matter’ – which did wonders for my self-confidence over the remainder of the evening, as you can imagine!”

Re unasked for comments from someone who recently took up graphology: “I was delighted she diagnosed you unfavourably too – and it made me giggle to myself to remember how old and ill I promptly felt. I don’t know how I shall manage to do a sufficiently legible scrawl this year to avoid too drastic a verdict again…”