VLADIMIR:
Boots must be taken off every day, I'm tired telling you that. Why don't you listen to me?

ESTRAGON:
Taking off my boot. Did that never happen to you?

VLADIMIR:
Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We were respectable in those days. Now it's too late. They wouldn't even let us up. (Estragon tears at his boot.) What are you doing?

ESTRAGON:
Ah stop blathering and help me off with this bloody thing.

VLADIMIR:
(gloomily). It's too much for one man. (Pause. Cheerfully.) On the other hand what's the good of losing heart now, that's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.

ESTRAGON:
And what of it?

VLADIMIR:
When I think of it . . . all these years . . . but for me . . . where would you be . . . (Decisively.) You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it.

ESTRAGON:
The same? I don't know.

VLADIMIR:
The same lot as usual?

ESTRAGON:
Beat me? Certainly they beat me.

VLADIMIR:
And they didn't beat you?

ESTRAGON:
(without gesture). Over there.

VLADIMIR:
(admiringly). A ditch! Where?

ESTRAGON:
In a ditch.

ESTRAGON:
(irritably). Not now, not now.

ESTRAGON:
(irritably). Not now, not now.

VLADIMIR:
Together again at last! We'll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.

ESTRAGON:
Me too.

VLADIMIR:
I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.

ESTRAGON:
Am I?