continued...

The power changes the price-bands don't, like social classes. It may have 100 times the power of anything five years ago, but it's still a cheap laptop. We are in space already. Man does not know the obvious in his own life. Still go round the houses to say what they mean. generations can't understand each other. Son is really solid like a big tub of Clover. The pluperfect. Attention. I was swimming back up where the hedges narrowed, and lastly I saw Matthew (a consultant in Bury St Edmunds from the 1990s) but I couldn't speak with him, and that was a pity because he stayed in my head all day. To just catch a face like that, to hear a voice say "Windows 95" creates terror and strength. The older you get, well you become obsessed with these things.

The floor was shining Somerset Levels (or Santa Pola? Tewkesbury?) - this wasn't in Martina's plans but it just happened. Come over and I'll show you the bike, said Matthew. I motored across Romney, shadowing a tractor in a long field blooming clouds of yellow; the church tower showed up on the right this time. All round me the waters were blessed by Martina's swift elegant mopping. You don't need to move - she said - I saw your feet twitch. Rabbits showed their scuts along the sunny side of the Kent Ditch. A bronze lamp-base with its spot of morning, swede half out of the clodded earth. Filthing fast, roaring past. We looked at the floor fluff. I don't know what it is. Fluff and skin, said Martina.

Boats ploughed the horizon. You think you're alone. Suddenly "BIKE!", Martina grabs at my arm to save my life; a dripping steel-grey hull lifts at my shoulder slapping the cool, salinated, slippery waves, the foam spitting and aggregating and splitting and white with a spot of morning, the marineros ahoying ¡A babor! ¡al estribor! My head exploded, I too wanted to lose a leg at Plinmuf, to lie along the deck all sticky with the catch, with red-threaded guts and gills, gulls sailing, cats hoofing, flakes of fish and the earth pitching. A perfect sphere is, from a certain point of view, the most natural and grounded shape, like our planet and like a marble on a patio border. But we pitch, we are here (we think), we can't help our relativistic apprehension/attention - or consider the marineros' habit of disfiguring la lengua patria - la lengua es un órgano que les estorba...

Some rooms in any house are transformation sites. The bathroom when you towel the mirror after a shower, the bedroom when you wake. But those are easy examples. The important ones are difficult. Living-room, for example, means a room for staying still.

Planted prow-nose, mystic broke open with a pheasant rocketing past my tender shoulder; a desert smoked with troops. I had no name so a man in stout khaki said: "You'd better come with me." I didn't want to hold his damp hand and he was nervous. In a bar or office I didn't hear what they were saying to each other. I found it contemptible and had no contribution to make. They found me a gawky, tongue-tied, dry old stick. It was too late to be an editorial assistant.