– If language came to us from the origins of time, then it has travelled space and ocean and air and touched every single heart and mind that ever walked on this planet. It has been more ferocious than the whip on the back of an adulterous woman in a village square in Lebanon. It is passed from father to son so they might loathe and fear what it is they desire – whether that thing carries a uterus or a penis. It labels all things – other – as something to be destroyed. The flesh knows its own queer predilection or its lack of normalcy and it denies it – all of our urges and want and knowledge exist in the subconscious first and foremost – so-called reality lies to itself and to everyone else. It is weapon and trap – liberator and monster. We are all at the mercy of and malleable to the programmes that raised us – whether they be religious, or class based, or gender biased. All structures are implemented through an underlying violence and brutality particular to this planet.

– Do you think I’ll still understand this when I’ve straightened up? John asks.

– Aye.

– You tried Scottish!

– Badly! Thing is, John, creatures like us, word travellers – we download transmissions via twenty-six letters of the alphabet, or twenty-four in the Greek alphabet, 3,000 characters of the Chinese alphabet, twenty-eight in Arabic, twenty-three in Latin, eighteen in Gaelic, twenty-seven in Spanish, seventy-one in Japanese including diacritics, thirty-six in the African alphabet that forms the basis for Fula, Ewe, Hausa, thirty-three in Amharic which originated as a consonant-only alphabet so Ethiopians could write in Ge‘ez. There are twenty-two in Aramaic, twenty-seven in Spanish, thirty-two in Icelandic. There’s Cherokee, Javanese, Mongolian, Ersu Shaba, Nüshu, Ogham, Sinhala, French, Italian, German, Balinese, Burmese, Armenian, Khmer, Thai, Lao, Tibetan, Dravidian, Cyrillic. I could go on for days because we have over 7,000 living languages and about only half of those are written, yet somehow your country persuaded the world that English was the only important one. You publish all your books in it. You are still scared even of accents!

– That was the neighbours more than us to be fair, John says.

– You blame everything on them!

– They’ve a lot to answer for. So, if all languages come from an original virus, or programme, the light source, the primordial matriarch as it were – what are they doing to us?

– Altering our chemical composition, our molecules, our energy imprint.

– It gets into our chromosomes?

– Every single one. It gets into absolutely everything, it changes the patterns of the brain. It exists here. See where I write it on the page it is simultaneously here and out in the universe where my mind expanded last week.

– I love you.

– I love you too, John.

– Is it crazy to love someone you’ve only spent seven days with in person?

– No, it’s crazy to love someone when you’ve known them for years.