Back home Melissa listens to the recording. She is moved. There is a tragic gulf between that draughty shed where the lifeboats were once launched and the universe of big ideas in which he lives. Perhaps there is some equation between shabby poverty and high aspiration. He sat there in his absurd hat, a small wicker basket resting on his curls giving the impression of an inverted botanical still life, convulsed by some very big ideas about . . . About what, exactly? About art, apparently. Art, which, one of her lecturers said, cannot be privileged over other human activities. The academics loved the word ‘privileged’. Mr MacCleod is perhaps the first person she has ever met who genuinely believes that art is something real, and necessary, something that should be privileged over any other human activity. She wonders if a story really can have many endings. There is something noble about Mr MacCleod; something suicidal. She thinks of him sitting on that one wooden kitchen chair, while she was virtually horizontal on the broken-backed sofa, his face charged, as though the currents of thought were causing his features to twitch. As they walked back from the sail room, he said, ‘I want you to record this’, and he began to quote. And she listens to it now.

‘ “I mean to say, said Lamont, whether a yarn is tall or small, I like to hear it well told. I like to meet a man who can take a hand to tell a story and not make a balls of it while he’s at it. I like to know where I am, do you know. Everything has a beginning and an end.” ’

She has no idea what is going on, who is saying what, and why a story can have a hundred endings.

She writes:

Today I met a man who told me that there was no such thing as a true story. He told that Jim MacCool had an arse so big that it would halt the movement of men through a mountain pass. It was one of the most exhilarating conversations I have ever had, although I had no idea whatever what he was talking about. This remarkable man is Artair MacCleod.

She files this fragment away, for use in her blog. And then she starts on the story the editor wants about the all-new Thomas the Tank Engine, scripts revised, engines freshly painted (how tacky they looked in the paint room) and the generous sponsorship of Binster’s Pies and Pasties in these straitened times, when Artair MacCleod’s grant from a charitable foundation has inexplicably been cut. She talks about the essential role of the arts in the Duchy, and introduces a note of indignation: so this is what happens when bankers’ greed brings the financial system down – children’s theatre in Cornwall is threatened, Celtic theatre is threatened, and much-loved institutions are put at risk. We cannot afford to let this happen!