Sonja doesn’t care about all this, she shrugs and changes the conversation if I mention it. I’m not fanatical about genealogy, merely curious, fanciful. I’m a Celt, hammered out of the tin mines of Cornwall and the coal mines of Wales. I have black hair and beard, periwinkle eyes and a table of a chest, a barrel of a body. I could beat back a band of Picts and still have time for breakfast. But, as the playwright Robert Bolt would say, a bitch got over the wall somewhere, for I have olive skin which tans in a moment. There must have been a gypsy or an Italian count who dallied in Dyfed or Kernow.

As I say, I’m not fanatical, merely curious because I’m a product of the land on which I live. After all, I’m only three generations from smallholding, goat-tending and tipping my cap. Around me there are fellow Celts, even in this cosmopolitan city. Recently in a gorge near Bristol there was a fall in a cave, soft limestone sloughing down beneath stalactites, to reveal a skeleton, supplicant and long dead, tens of thousands of years old. The gorge is remote, even now, small-town and landlocked. The people who know how to prised the DNA of this long-dead man from his body and took samples from everyone in the nearby villages. They found a perfect match, a shy, diffident school-teacher whose face almost exactly mirrored a projected mask of the dead man. I told Sonja about this and she shrugged and changed the conversation.

When the taxi brought me back from the hospital, pacemaker pulsing silently in my ribcage, my chest hurt. The scar prickled, my ribs felt tender and my heart ached. Ever since I was a boy I’d worried about my heart breaking - I’d never given a thought to it aching and had certainly not imagined it stopping. I sat in the cab and watched Sonja in our front garden, wielding secateurs and trowel, rummaging in a black bin-bag, digging and delving. Her hair was pinned up and she wore a sarong. She turned when I opened the cab door, looking guilty and doubtful (looking like the daughter of a tribe who had crossed two continents). Seeing me she smiled, came to the car and hugged me, fussing over bags and payment, before leading me into the house. Hours later, after we had made very gende love, after we had taken tea, after I had looked at my post, I went into the garden alone as she ran us a bath. I opened the bin-bags she’d filled and found in them the butchered remnants of every bleeding-heart plant we had.

I wonder sometimes whether Sonja’s synaesthesia is a side effect of her family’s peregrinations. Perhaps they saw so much that was new, tasted so much that was different, heard so many sounds previously unheard by them, that they carried with them a sensory overload they couldn’t name. This is what’s difficult with synaesthesia. It has to be described in language because there are no other tools. Even Microsoft Word doesn’t have a toolbar that reads ‘language, thesaurus, synaesthesia’, and if it did what would it say? ‘Monday — peaches’, ‘Brandy - Rodin’s Kiss’ ‘Volcano - hand running over dead coral? Even then it would be only one synaesthete’s version of the world.