I am still here, still digging my holes and filling them in, and am still for the greater part the person I was when I first began doing it, although my bones ache a great deal more, and I fear I only have a year or so left at it. My reading and writing has improved, with the help of my father’s old books. Mumble the cow is no longer amongst the living. In the end, she outlasted my father, Edward and my mother, and very close to the end of her life, I decided she should not be so lonely, and got some companions for her, after purchasing some land off Benny Woodcock. The herd – or their successors – provide milk but I don’t push them hard or make a song and dance about its availability. If people come for it, they come. Nonetheless these cows are more than enough to occupy the time I do not spend deep in the earth or words. I am glad of them and glad to not be a man who depends on them for income, to be a man who owns a plot of land and the roof above his head. Some say the damp in here is not good for my lungs but I have outlived many a man who spent his life in more parched rooms. My mother, in her more sensitive, confessional final days, told me that when he had the place built, Edward inserted a shoe in the wall, and a doll which an old lady in the village had told him would give the place protection from misfortune. The doll, she said, had originally been part of a pair. But I do not know about the truth of this. There are a few things I know for sure. Children swimming in a river will never be quiet, that is one. You cannot count the tadpoles in your pond, that is another. But there is infinitely more I don’t know, just as ever it was.