Buoyed by his plan to enlist Daniel Day-Lewis, he walks up the road from the boathouse to the village. From there he takes the bus to Pentire where the library offers free computer and internet usage. Although you have to pay for printing. He finds that Daniel Day-Lewis’s agent is William Morris, located on El Camino Drive, Beverly Hills. He looks around the library, and imagines that El Camino Drive is very different from this rather gloomy, enervated room. He sees palms and David Hockney swimming pools. So this letter will be going on a long and circuitous journey to California and back to Ireland. In the meanwhile he will have time to finish the first draft and also, of course, send his manuscript off to Texas. He wonders how long the professors and other expert littérateurs will need to assess the value. They already have some of Flann O’Brien’s work, and a few boxes of Joyce’s leftovers and some stuff that once belonged to Yeats, so they will welcome this manuscript.

Now that the tide is more or less out, he gets what Flann O’Brien described as the ancient smell of putridity, although O’Brien was talking about the history of Ireland rather than the mud, but everything – past, present, character, myth, mud – is interconnected.

After he has posted the letter he wonders whether he should have explained in more detail what he has in mind: a play and a film which explore O’Brien’s idea that fictional characters do exist and can resist the author who tries to make use of them in his fiction. He recalls a film about John Malkovich, and perhaps he should have mentioned that to Daniel, to demonstrate that he is not just talking about hoary old myth and creaking theatre, but postmodernism. If anybody can give Flann O’Brien flesh and blood, and box-office appeal, it’s Daniel. Daniel has that magical, alchemical power given to very few actors.

Then he pops into his bank to see if his quarterly grant has finally arrived. He’s asked the bank to phone him when it comes, but as he’s right outside, he thinks he might as well drop in and save the postman’s shoe-leather. The cashier on duty is new. She has a full, seamless face; it has, he thinks, the appearance of a sea creature, a seal or a dolphin, the eyes almost flat on the surface, so that she has something of the charming innocence of those creatures.

‘Hello,’ he says, ‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you before.’

‘I’ve only been here for a few weeks. I used to be in Truro.’

‘Magnificent city, lovely cathedral. I am Artair MacCleod,’ he says, and pauses, but she shows no surprise. Truro is some way off.

‘What can I do for you today, sir?’