I’m coming to see that he has no conceptual equipment—nothing that would help him to analyse a mess like the one we’re in. All he can do is repeat his statements of will and purpose. But when I calm down and start taking things apart, he listens to me and almost always agrees. Or appears to. Because what I say lets him off the hook. Of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Neither of us is a criminal. At those moments I have a powerful sense of myself as working.