As Steph is rummaging through the clothes on a table in the religious house one day she picks up a T-shirt with the words printed on it ‘Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times if one only remembers to turn on the light’. The words are inlaid into a white and green floral print that is set off against the black background colour of the T-shirt. Steph is taken by the line and reads it aloud before she measures the T-shirt up to the front of her body, showing it to the rest of us. The following brief dialogue takes place.

This chapter explores two particular myths and beliefs that are expressed by people in the group and the realities that in turn confront these. It is also about what people say and do when faced with harsh realities. People in the group use such phrases, perhaps one could even call them myths, and tell them to each other (usually unconsciously) to make sense of events and even to provide a particular logic for such events. The phrase ‘what goes around comes around’ is redolent of ideas of virtue, morality and justice. It has a ‘you get what you deserve in life’ element, but it also refers to the idea that there is some process of reciprocal justice (natural/divine) that inexorably works itself out in the world. The second phrase, ‘it's not where you live but how you live that matters’, appeared earlier in Michelle's story and has a different logic and applies more to place and to the attempt to transcend the limits of place and to the idea that one can do this and live a dignified life as long one knows how. Whatever problems that exist in or are attached to a place can somehow be transcended by living in a virtuous way. And yet there is an acknowledgement that one may have to leave the estate to lead or to try to find a good life.