There’s telepathy. There must be, otherwise there was no reason at all why my other reel should be of where it was, that’s where Liz and I had a honeymoon the year before we got married.

I’d avoided it since the divorce. I’m not a sentimentalist and if I were, what the hell would I be doing going back to a place where that all began? But somehow I got there. They knew me after a bit, the hotel filing system being what it is, and by some extraordinary means someone had stuck my gold credit card in my passport which apart from another hire car was all I brought with me. So there I was in the hotel and I went across to the sleazy one and got them to send my sacks of mail across. I walked both ways.

I’d forgotten to say this reel is about Rome, no, not religious Rome but hotel Rome. You get to Piazza what’s-it with the fountain in the little boat and then up the Steps and the hotel is at the top. There’s a church up there too but the glass is lousy and the hotel far, far preferable. It’s a very understanding hotel. They turned my hire car in and gave me the room I wanted, one with a balcony because if you have things you don’t want to think about you can always look at the view and fashionably dislike the Victor Emmanuel monument though it’s better than most of the rest of the crummy Roman architecture, you can see I have no taste. In any case my desert kept getting in the way of the view. Now here is a remarkable thing and I regard it as being in the same line of phenomenon as Padre Pio and Wilfred Barclay, bank clerk, it’s all in the mind. The fact is that even when I was awake and sober my feet were beginning to hurt and so was my hand. That made me change hands in the dream when writing or drawing but I only made both my hands hurt. So I would spend a lot of time in the bathroom with the cold tap on, sitting on the edge of the bath with my feet in the water and putting one hand at a time under the tap. It helped to a certain extent. In fact I must draw your attention to another of those farcical incidents to which Wilf is subject, he had the stigmata like St Francis only in reverse as it were, for being a mother-fucking bastard as my best friend would say instead of getting them as a prize for being good. I make a joke of it as indeed it does not need to be made, being one already but believe me it was no fun. The whole situation was thoroughly out of hand. I remember one evening—no. It’s a separate reel.