– I once knew a man who sailed for twenty-three years without an incident and just after he had bragged about it, that very day the ship had an accident and killed him and everyone else on board. That evening I heard another bulletin on the radio of an aeroplane that had gone down over Florida, Flight 23, everyone dead and another captain with the exact same name. By this I mean to say it is like what MacNeice articulates in his poem called ‘Snow’.

– Which is what?

– Here we are in a room and it is light and small and warm and we are held by it – despite the carnivorous nature behind this building’s facade, however the carnivorous nature behind the building’s facade is the same as that in snow – life is so much more than we can manage it to be, it is so much more sudden than we are able to understand.

– I feel that.

– He says how the world is so much more than we think, so much crazier than we think. It is too drunk and too various.

– I need a drink.

– John Glenn circles the world three times in Friendship 7 – he is a man in space. Meantime Polaroids are going to do colour prints that will develop themselves within sixty seconds. The civil rights movement has to see young black men in university and women too! The Cold War is getting worse, they have assassinated Kennedy and they are threatening nuclear arms. All the time we are on the brink of the entire planet’s destruction at the hands of crazy, powerful men! They want to put a man on the moon before the decade is done. There is an army of hippies with dogs on strings who will put away their tie-dye trousers into non-recyclable bins, cut off their dreadlocks and burn them. They will scour out their brains with bleach, learn to sit in chairs in square rooms.

– We won’t change anything?

– It will need to be changed and challenged again and again! The hippies and thinkers will mostly quit. They will sit on chairs in square rooms and talk to other people in square rooms. They will collect their paycheck from a square box. They will go back to other square rooms. Smaller ones this time, where they will fold clothes and find their fridge without milk or cheese and they will go to another square room where a man with some things to sell them will do so and they will go back home to put their food in square boxes. They will still think about why we all obey these men who have given themselves a catchy covers-all trademark in one single word – government – but they won’t keep standing up to shout about it.

– It’s so desperately bad! John says.