Anna Raverat

I love everything about hotels, but if I had to choose one thing it would be the breakfasts

“Just a little bit” has been my basic approach to eating and drinking since I was a teenager. Unfortunately a little bit of everything over twenty years adds up to quite a lot.

We are arguing about what to call it. He disputes the use of “affair” because they didn’t have sex and therefore it was not an affair but an “inappropriate friendship.” I believe him about the sex but object to the wording. I think “affair” is more accurate because their “friendship” was a secret from me and from her own husband and from their normal perhaps boring but appropriate friends, and because they had kissed.

Their top three indicators of a fit and healthy relationship are talking, spending time together, and satisfying sex.

We all have different things for breakfast, which my own mother thinks is crazy. “It’s the only meal of the day that could be really simple and no work at all—everyone could have the same thing out of the same box.”

One of the great things about staying in a hotel is that real life is someone else’s job: someone else takes the decisions; someone else does the shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry. It’s like being a child again.

I know that cake is not supposed to feature in the diet of someone who wants to lose three or four pounds, but cake is good for the soul.

But it’s easier to chastise yourself for being a fool than to admit, even to your closest friend, the terrifying plummet of your humiliating failure to see. The fear is not that you will hit the bottom; the fear is that there is no bottom to hit.