But there is some good news from the autograph people, Fraser’s: they will accept the Richard III for sale with a reserve of £500. Also on the plus side, Thomas the Tank Engine is playing to almost capacity audiences of cynical little fat children and their obese, fleece-clad parents, and he has been able to pay the actors. But he wonders how it is that at the age of seventy-six he is obliged to go himself to the scene of the breakdown to pay cash for a tow-truck. His assistant is still away with back trouble, a well-known symptom of depression. Also he has received an email from El Camino Drive. In fact, it is more in the nature of an automatic response, acknowledging receipt of his email, than a reply, but he has high hopes for the life of Flann O’Brien, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. The Bloomsday framework for the piece has given it coherence. He will have to explain it to Daniel in person, but you have to allow agents the conceit that nothing can happen without their assent. Their true life’s work is to prove that they are as important as their clients. When they wake in the night they understand that they are just the pimps in the real relationship: the panders, the go-betweens. They have no talent, and they know it. The transformative power of art is a mystery to them. To Artair it is everything. His life has been a string of triumphs and disappointments but he has always been sustained by the certainty that life is for living according to your highest aspirations. Life is for burning up. And a life lived in the pursuit of art is the only one worth living. On any rational assessment, he is at a low point – penniless, under threat from landlords and banks, stabbed in the back by the Tubal family, and with his clapped-out production of Thomas the Tank Engine and its poorly painted sets stuck on the A30 in a horse box. A certain unaccustomed desolation surrounds him as he looks out at the green, ceaselessly motile tide and the hulk of the fishing boat, which lends a suggestion of memento mori to the view; yes, he is at a low point, but he knows that Flann O’Brien is a project that has unlimited possibility. He has tried to contact Fleur direct, but the letter has obviously not found its way through the security that these rich families employ to protect themselves; they have battalions of lawyers and gatekeepers. Wealth makes them nervous. He nibbles the crust of a cheese-and-onion pasty. He has acquired a pasty aroma: there’s something farinaceous about his piss, too.