Last year was the warmest on record, apparently. We lie in the park and I have my hand on your belly. Your phone rings, but you ignore it. But that’s just a distant memory. People displaced across the middle east, right wingers making gains, anger rising. I can hear myself, in the kitchen, expounding, fulminating, to my daughter, about the need for a more communal, loving, vibe in the World. I want the best for everyone, I espouse the end of the wrecking neo-liberal free market, but all I can really think about is the bluegrass LP I will one day record for you. The end of ‘the national interest’ and a move towards a global interest, I say, but really what I mean is I wish I knew the name of that perfume you used to wear so I could relive the past like Proust with his Madeleine cake. I shouldn’t really reference that as I’ve never read it, better to use Ullysses. Something about Bloom. Erm, what was it he ate in the pub? I can’t remember, while reading it I was drunk and had flu in the Venezuelan Andes one weekend around Christmas, just before the attempted military coup - but the book was a page turner. We went on a James Joyce walk in Dublin last Easter and when it started to rain, I texted you. Rain reminds me of the pain of thinking about you and not sleeping. And that time just after Sergeant Pepper when I was running towards a door, my finger lodging under the hinge as it slammed shut, my mother somewhere, who knows where? I should be somewhere now, campaigning, helping, making a difference, living up to my rhetoric, serving, out there in the world, but I am in a small cocoon of my humming mind archives, Coldfall Wood in high summer amid the fantastical dream of escaping from the world. With you. If everyone in the world was given an acoustic guitar on their 16th birthday we’d sort it all out, I said, and everyone could record a bluegrass LP for the people they love – no more wars… though I didn’t say that bit. Just thought it.