Sentence The Twohundredandseventyninth
We woke this morning to the news that David Bowie is dead – quite a shock; all the more so for those of my Aunts who were his contemporaries, and a feeling of numb sadness for the rest of us;
 even the Syrians – who had experienced so many untimely deaths first-hand – were quiet and restrained, and I recalled the day when a gang of us children had been playing on the Eildons in the summer heat and had come across an adder, it's diamond-patterned back recognisable to even us
city-girls, which had bitten a small boy from Selkirk (why he was there alone, I never did discover) and how I had been inveigled into accepting the onerous task of running back to tell Aunty Crist of our discovery for she always knew 'what to do' and always did – the others bringing the boy down more slowly, for as mugwumps we felt no animosity towards this intruder from that distant Burgh, while the locals in our regular game had plenty of names for the residents of Tokyo or the Pail-Merks from Gala – and finding her sitting alone in the kitchen, it must have been Cook's day off, peeling potatoes and listening to Major Tom on the wireless; and even to this day, that song brings back feelings of ineffable sadness, wondering how the boy, trembling and afraid to move when we came upon him, would have fared had we not, sitting there, all alone and as far from assistance as Major Tom.
 
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