“For the most part, my parents seemed to me neither noticeably happy nor unhappy, but behaved with each other much as many of my friends’ parents who behaved: like two adults without much in common who happened to be thrown together on a long car journey. Drawn-out conversations about logistics, silences filled by the welcome distraction of other voices on the radio, and the recurrent niggle that things would be better if they had taken a slightly different route.”
