I went to work and broke through a brick wall or went round the side of it or dug under it or something: Athena’s moral crisis and flight. The pace picked up incredibly. Present tense. A weaving and twining of many a disparate thread. All these years of note-taking, of being what Joan Didion calls ‘a lonely, anxious re-arranger of things’, are now paying off. I even got in the skier on the colour TV in the Italian cafe! That image has been dogging me for ten years at least.