Mood

When I was 16 and studying at college, I was delighted to be employed as an unpaid volunteer in a charity shop – my parents were somehow not quite so impressed despite their “get a job” instruction having technically been fulfilled.

Blessed

I walk from the campus to the train station every evening and am reminded of my grandmother. The aromatic scent of curry leaves from the restaurants on London Road ignite my senses and, curiously, conjure images of chicken pieces in mushroom sauce. A series of associations devised by the memory of homemade chips, I theorise. A grave injustice is more thunderously sorrowful than the relief which follows in solitary outlines.

Velleity

In Mother Tongue Bill Bryson tells us that if we harbour an urge to look through the windows of the homes we pass, there is a word for the condition: crytoscopophilia. Despite these assurances, Microsoft Word still underlines it in red.