I am not insane. I am afraid. I don’t want to live and have to keep worrying about all the shit about children being bullied online and I’m holding off on getting mine mobile phones. I fear that Mikey and Joey may not make good men, and I worry that Maeve will fall for a weak man. I could leave them, I could move to another part of the country, I’ve always had a yen to set up in Connemara, but they would still be here, in this house.

I am an educated man. I do not take drugs, prescribed or otherwise, nothing to combat loneliness or a general reluctance for life itself. It’s just that I am living in fear. The fear is like a crazy person running after you as you sleep. Tearing away, you are in grave danger of being attacked, and you try to run from him but your legs won’t work. And in the dream you cannot fathom why your legs have become paralysed. They worked before, why not now, when you so desperately need them to? And when you toss and turn and try to breathe new life into your immobile legs, you wriggle in your bed, and as a child, you eventually fall out, but as an adult you simply wake up. And you start another day and the semblance of terror that you felt in the dream isn’t tangible any more but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

I look around my house and I see a place of comfort, not excessive abundance, but a pleasant place to be. There are books lining the walls. Our children sometimes colour and read in their spare time and play rounders on the green. Jenny is in her forties now. She is a little too thin but very attractive. I love the way her hair falls about her face as she works on her carving and her sketches. To me, she is still beautiful. She will not have much sex with me though, and that doesn’t cause me any great degree of anger per se, but sometimes I become tired of pleading with her to feel me. When she agrees to my request, it isn’t very pleasurable because her hands are not as smooth as I would like. They are calloused right at the bases of her fingers, just where they ought to be soft.

Jenny is an artist of wood but she sketches too. I adore her sketches, pencil scratchings, etchings almost, of things that she finds when she beachcombs: Budweiser cans and Pražský cans and Fanta orange, stones and feathers and bladder wrack. I never forget that the Latin name for bladder wrack is Fucus vesiculosus. I often compliment her on her work. She brushes my praise away as though it doesn’t mean a thing.