I sat there, amused, and having my ego massaged gently, when Rick Tucker, while turning a page, chanced to glance up at his audience. It was the dustbin all over again. It was glug or gulp. From that moment his voice faded and his colour deepened. Listening intently, I could tell why. He was drawing his chin back into his collar. He was not the sort of man who finds it possible to depart from the text before him. The stream of typed words drew him along inexorably to where, in my hearing, he did not want to go. He claimed, I heard him mutter, a deep personal relationship with me and (what a more experienced academic would not have wished to have, knowing the slipperiness of that slope) my verbal agreement with everything he was now telling his listless audience. Then, perhaps faced by some even more outrageous statement of our alleged intimacy, he tried to ad lib, turned two pages at once, then dropped the whole manuscript from the desk so that it glided and fluttered this way and that across the floor. It woke the audience and during that brief interlude I made an unseen exit. Next day I performed the party piece I was paid for and raked the audience for a sign of Rick, hoping to show him what could be done in the way of ad libbing round a man who claimed a deep personal relationship with me but he was nowhere to be found. I wonder why? Such sensitivity was not like him. Then the whole thing slipped from my mind because when I went back to Italy things took a steep dive into the absurd and I got the shock I was not prepared for. It was a mixture of quaintness, meanness and majestic lunacy. I was prepared to be dignified but forgiving about the plane not being met by a car; but the gate was shut, barred and locked. A green canvas wagon tilt just by the gate covered several suitcases all carefully, you might say lovingly, packed with my personal effects. How the servants must have sniggered. I sat in the taxi, a folder containing all the guff from the conference on the seat by me, and wondered where to go. It was an Italian comeuppance.

Fortunately Coldharbour kept on selling, as it still does, to say nothing of All We Like Sheep, and money was no problem. Neither, at that time, was invention, for I saw, leafing through the papers from the conference, that I had no need of it. Here, then, is what turns that whole mixed episode—my Italian connection, Padre Pio, stigmata, Rick L. Tucker with his graph of my relative clauses—into what I now see to have become the central strand of my life. For, sitting that evening in a hotel bedroom, the papers were all I had to read and I read the lot.