The train not in fact going to Bratislava, I wrote to the author of the pamphlet the minute I got home to Notting Hill Gate. I had never heard of Camilla Marteline before, but I noticed that she was sole director of the Alternative Centre so I wrote to her there, at Castle Boterel – on the off-chance that it had a postal system – expressing my appreciation and gratitude, venturing to differ ever so slightly with one or two of her judgements, just for the look of the thing, and asking her if she would be so good as to send me whatever else she had written on the small but significant subject of Thomas Hardy’s virility. I signed myself a fellow thresher in the cornfield of inflated reputations and enclosed what seemed to me an appropriately sized self-addressed envelope.