I WORK in the bone library now, my dear brother, and they have done a few things differently since this war began. Just the other day I got into work to find they have built a shooting range in the basement of the veterinary college and the vets’ practice down there and I suspect they are often drunk – which for armed men with little talent for shooting is deeply unsettling. It made me feel antsy so I went down for some target practice and walked out to silence behind me. That showed them! I will not be going back down there again. It’s impossible to hear any sound from the basement so they can shoot off as many rounds as they like. There are a great many parts of the Royal Dick veterinary building that are like that. My good friend the postman told me there are 550 rooms – he is deeply boo coo but I like him. The postman drinks at least as much as me. He needs to. I need to as well. We all need to really. The postman went home with one of the vets’ wives last year and she now has a child as ginger as he. It is not mentioned by anyone on the staff and we are all just real polite when she comes in to visit with the baby, we don’t say a thing. I guess I am learning how to be British except as it turns out this is another country altogether but I will get to that later. There are dissection rooms in the building and lecture theatres and a cafe but I am not into what they cook, they don’t dress their sandwiches well – it’s almost a tragedy, I don’t think they’ve seen a po’ boy in their life. I’m missing gumbo filé, can you send me some? I got me a serious envie for shrimp too – pinch the tail and suck the head! Fuck me, brother, I am homesick. Anyway, tonight I need to get some groceries! I will cook something back at the apartment. I’m getting better at cooking and it serves me well to fend for myself on distant shores. You remember that new zydeco band we danced to at Breaux Bridge near Lafayette? Crawfish races and dancing, they don’t do it like that here but in wartime everybody really wants to party, the Scottish can totally pass a good time and then some – I’ll give them that. I get interest from some of the girls here but I am still a Southern gent. Well, I am most days. This building has its own bar and distillery and there are rooms full of tiny cracked sinks with sheep’s heads decaying in them. Since I’ve been here they’ve dissected a zebra, two cows, one bull, a gazelle, and a bear – there are dead snakes beautifully preserved and there is a wall of giant moths pinned to black cloth. There are countless boxes of bones. The bones are my primary concern. I don’t let no one else deal with them. They can stay the hell out of my business. I file the bones and sort them numerically by size and species. There is a maintenance room with a boiler bigger than all the fires of hell, there’s rage in that boiler. I don’t want to be killed by the damn thing so I go nowhere fucking near it. If it ever blows up we are all going straight to hell with it. In the Cube building across the way there is a room registered to Egypt. Whatever they do in there, it’s not legal in this country. Folks disappear through a plastic sheet, then they shower apparently, I have to find out more about it. Lectures take place most days. They treat hundreds of animals here every week. Mary Dick is the boss’s sister. She’s the one who really keeps this place running. Nobody wants to disappoint her and if anyone is disgraced it’s her office they have to go to and nobody wants to do that – she is quite a woman, I like her a lot. Mary founded a scheme to treat the animals of poor people free of charge and it makes me glad to see animals go out mended. There have been two racehorses in here this month alone and each of them was worth more money than we will ever see.