As per Jeremy and Jamie's suggestion, I walked along Regent's Canal from Little Venice to Camden, in the shade of trees as old as empire, past houseboats sinking low under barricades of potted plants, rusting bike parts and the like; past lovers marked by the universal sign of hand-holding; past sloped-shouldered boys tossing wrappers into the grass; and long-maned girls giggling over their mobiles.

Like Orpheus, I walked alone, back from the Land of the Dead, between Disconsolation and wild wanton Freedom.

Movie or song or poem, the form does not matter for Orpheus. The matter is time: time after time, time atop time, simultaneously composing, composition, decomposing, compost. A river, birds, willows weeping: I've seen this all so many times and I never fail to feel astonished.

. . .

Later I had a glass of wine in a dark humid space full of beautiful people, after watching an enflamed football fly across a screen as a village is struck time and time again by lightning: the living, as ever in tension with the projected, with history.

Soon I would return to Galway: like a horse without saddle or bridle.

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