Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Ayckbourn

A perfectly English insult: polite on the surface, devastating in the mechanics. Ayckbourn doesn’t call the man stupid, cruel, or even boring. He calls him "heavy going" - a phrase that lands like a sigh you’ve finally given yourself permission to exhale. It’s social code for someone who turns every conversation into work, someone who drains oxygen from a room without technically breaking any rules. The adverb "terribly" sharpens the blade while keeping the speaker’s hands clean; it’s judgment disguised as tasteful understatement.

Then comes the metaphor, and it’s not lofty - it’s tactile, comic, humiliatingly specific. "Like running up hill in roller skates" captures effort that doesn’t convert into progress: you strain, you slip, you look ridiculous, and the incline keeps winning. The image matters because it’s bodily. You can feel the frictionless wheels, the panic of lost traction, the small indignity of failing in public. Ayckbourn’s theater thrives on that exact discomfort: characters trapped by manners, by small talk, by their own inability to say the blunt thing, so the blunt thing arrives via comparison.

The intent is social triage. The speaker is trying to justify avoidance while still sounding civilized, turning personal dislike into a description of logistics: he’s not a bad person, he’s an exhausting terrain. Subtext: the speaker wants credit for trying, and wants you to agree that continuing to try would be irrational. In an Ayckbourn world, that’s how relationships corrode - not with big betrayals, but with the slow, comic grind of people who are simply too much work to love.