"I was, I think, trying to clear up in the house of my childhood. 'Clear up' what, I am not sure. There was a sense that something had come to an end and the house must be prepared for a new phase. To this purpose, I was gingerly setting about taking down the curtains that hung in the bow window of the front room. The curtains, I was aware, had been left there by my mother. She was gone now. Perhaps she was dead, or perhaps - I seem to remember seeing this out of the corner of my dreaming eye - she had recently been rejuvenated to a state of girlhood in a kind of reincarnation. The curtains seemed to be made of bubble wrap. They were perforated horizontally with 'dotted lines' at two levels - midway and just below the curtain-rail. I was tearing down the right-hand curtain along the lower of the two dotted lines, at the mid-point. I was unsure, however, that I was doing the right thing.
"My sister was standing a little way to my left, looking on.
"'Will we have to put this back up?' I asked her.
"There was something confused about the question. I wanted to know whether I should be tearing at the mid-point or the higher point, but it was not really clear that only tearing half of the curtains down was an effective compromise if they needed to be put back up again.
"'No,' she replied, 'the whole lot can come down.'
"With this confirmation I then proceeded without reservation to tear the curtains down along the higher dotted line." Anon