Mark Watson

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And all the times she’d been called a control freak, they were right, but they didn’t understand why: because what she couldn’t control was terrifying. Because what we couldn’t control was death and that was too much for her brain, that was what sometimes made her so frightened that she could not make a mental connection with anything else, made her stop in the street and want to buckle over.

Puedes cambiar la vida de una persona sin saberlo siquiera

Iris giggles again, and there is no difference, Xavier thinks, between the young woman who met Tony in 1950 and the one calling now; the high-spirited 1950 version is still serving people in the grocery shop, even though the shop no longer stands where it did; somehow, each individual moment goes on existing, somewhere.

You defined yourself by participating in other people's lives.

But excuses didn't mean anything in the end. What actually happened in the end was what mattered.

We often hear that technology is fragmenting the world, reducing our relationships to screen exchanges rather than the real stuff, and so on, as if machines - rather than humans - were responsible for maintaining our mental health. I wanted to write something which explored the opposite possibility: that phones give us a power to affect and improve each other's lives that we have never had in history before. Contacts was of course written before the bewildering events of 2020, but the lockdown has reminded a lot of us how dependent we all are upon the core relationships in life, on our networks, and perhaps how much we've taken some of those relationships for granted. Contacts is about the fact that, for all its dangers, the age of instant communication gives us what is basically a superpower... If we only choose to use it.

Someone asked me recently - what would I rather give up, food or sex. Neither! I'm not falling for that one again, wife.

Three guests check in to a hotel, like we just checked in here. The guy behind the desk says it’s $30, so they each pay ten. Later the clerk realizes he overcharged them: it should have been $25. So he gives the bellboy five bucks to return to the guests. Obviously he can’t divide it equally. He keeps $2 for himself. Gives one dollar back to everyone. So they have all paid nine dollars now, yes?’ Everyone agreed that this was true. ‘And the bellboy has two. So they’ve paid nine times three, twenty-seven. He has two. But we started with thirty. So where is the missing dollar?