"I have always been unlucky in romance, and lucky in friendship. I almost wrote "unlucky in love", but that is not true; yet the instinct exists - to pour all our experience of love into one particular vessel. My friendships have been vast, encompassing, and structuring, framing all the important and unimportant moments in my life. There have been friends at parties and as neighbours and in hospitals and running errands and holding my hand, screaming off the edge of a sharp cliff. I don't really think of them as family, because this implies that family is the only way to practise such strong bonds of care. They are just, in every way, crucial to my life; to the everyday and the grand future and everything in between."