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All the voices
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And in a certain ever-so-
sympathetic mood they’d
tut with false pity and
start saying it was a shame
about my legs and that it
must have been awful to
have to limp.
I’d got what was left of my
bread out of the wrapper
and was about to toast it
when Glea suddenly said
she’d looked up ‘Dell’ on
the internet and it meant
a woody valley. Did I
know that that’s what my
name meant, she wanted
to know? And she said
she had also looked up
Damien but weren’t quite
sure whether it meant
the person was tame
themselves or was a tamer
of other things. It was
a bit unclear. Aggie had
joined in and said it was
fascinating looking into
the meaning of names.
To me though this name
thing was too obsessional,
as I’ve said. As if the name
itself meant a whole lot
more than it did.
An underlying thought:
It’s like when people set
up stand ins for the real
and then they’ve related
to them so much they
have got confused: In
their minds the stand
in has become the real.
They have lost sight of
the difference altogether.
You got people who went
around kissing pictures
of a celebrity they liked
or sent birthday cards to
some actor playing the
part of this character they
watched on tv. They were
fooling themselves. And
what would happen if
they didn’t have all these
celebs to follow; all this
stuff to cling to, would
they sink into the valley of
the shadow of…? I came to