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know it. She’d let you walk all over her, and she wouldn’t bear a grudge. And she might have thought she had nothing to show for it at the end of the day, but God did it make you love her.’
    Dad’s eyes burned; Max shook my useless hand; I felt like I was falling.
    And then that was that. My mother was buried. Everyone went back to their living. She had been; she was not. It had occurred to me before that my life somehow contained my death – that the story of my life had to end somewhere – but now I realised that the course of my life was determined all along the way by the deaths of others, her death contained in my life.
    I could hardly find a job now. It seemed like an insult, the idea that I might turn away from thoughts of her and start squirreling away money. That I might just set her aside, like an unconvincing book, fending off guilt by telling myself that I would get around to preserving her memory one day. Before this, grief had been as inconceivable to me as a black winter coat in a summer heat wave. And yet here it was. I put it on and it fit. It formed a layer between the world and me. It was heavy and stifling; it tired me out, made me hungry. Without her and with Max now in a flat of his own, the routines of the house fell apart, and we rarely remembered to shop for food. One day, there was nothing left in the cupboard but the half-finished pack of Dutch waffles, which had gone stale. I ate each of them slowly at the kitchen table, willing them to offer some kind of bite, but they were soft and chewy. They were the last food she had bought. We had eaten every other trace. Time was undoing her effect on the world already. I went shopping at the big Tesco so that I could buy more Dutch waffles, seven or eight packs. It was good to have them there.

6
    Back to School
    Before I could think of finding a job, I decided to pay tribute to her, and to try to educate myself a little. I missed the way she would constantly feed me half-digested information like a bird to her chicks. It was only natural, then, that after her death I sought out a surrogate in the greatest pool of half-digested information in the world: Wikipedia. I did consider buying a selection of the popular For Idiots series when I found an offer on at W H Smith, but as I picked up Self-Confidence for Idiots , I wondered whether theirs was the right approach. And it wasn’t as if the internet was still stuck in the era of my schooldays, when homework had involved triangulating a single line of information on the Encarta CD-ROM with the unlimited untruths of Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves. Now we had Wikipedia, and it was learning more and improving every day.
    I started by learning about Wikipedia itself. The demographic for its top ten thousand editors was single males between eighteen and thirty with no partner, no children and a degree. Some people had made hundreds of thousands of edits, for no other reason than to contribute. It was a charity with 150 staff but four hundred million hits a month. Nature magazine said in a study that it was nearly as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica . The Encyclopaedia Britannica only had about a hundred editors, but it did start in 1768. Some people had read the whole thing, all thirty-two thousand pages of it. I wondered if anyone would ever read all of the four million articles on the English language Wikipedia. I supposed it would be impossible now, that human knowledge had exceeded the capacity of any one human.
    Now, I’d be the first, or the second, to admit that I don’t know everything. But no one knows everything. By studying their behaviour, I had realised that many so-called clever people are really just people who know how to steer the conversation round to the things they know, and refuse to engage with topics that they don’t know. So I decided there would be two phases to my education: the gathering of any old information I could find, and