I can't get a signal http://lasuperiornyc.com/?hamlet-madness-essay.pdf mad compliment report writing for weird insane Alex’s own background is financially strapped gentry. Her father died when she was five, and her mother, Irene, took in lodgers and worked as a secretary to make ends meet. When Alex announced her engagement to John Timpson, Irene considered she was marrying beneath her. ‘Trade, you see,’ she says with a chortle. She describes a happy, ‘free-range’ childhood in Lymm near Warrington. ‘Although I was quite, um, difficult.’ She loathed boarding school and says, ‘I’ve never been very good with rules.’ In fact she positively rejoiced in breaking them. She tells a story about the daughter of a family friend, which is hilarious and awful in equal measure. ‘Laura, her name was. She was a beautiful girl, very clever, with long blond curls, and I hated her so I got a pair of scissors and chopped her hair off. I fed her aspirin, too. I’m not proud of it.’ Maybe this is part of the reason she has such an affinity with troubled children. ‘Some of my grown-up foster children have described this kind of behaviour as a sort of “red mist”,’ she says. ‘The red mist comes, you can’t stop yourself doing something destructive, then afterwards you don’t know why you did it.’