I’ll choose to ignore that comment. Anyway, you were switched off that day, so you wouldn’t know, and you shouldn’t assume that just because somebody is called Craig that they are a Craig. I’ve met loads of Emmas who aren’t Emmas at all, for example, although having said that nearly all the Lauras I’ve met are very much Lauras, which is fine with me. I do think I am quite a Bea, overall. Craig said he spoke to nearly everyone on the moor and nearly every conversation added to his knowledge of the place. A bit like you gathering and assimilating your information, I suppose. He said he was a guide and he did what he called Legend Walks and that I should think about coming on one. So I did think about it, and I decided I didn’t want to, but what he said about the pool has lingered in my mind ever since, the way he described the colour of it and the depth and the sound when you were in it. He said the marker you had to look out for was a sickly looking hawthorn next to three piled rocks, which didn’t seem to narrow it down massively in my mind, if I am honest, and who is to say the hawthorn isn’t now dead and gone, if it was already sickly twenty-five months ago? He said the pool wasn’t part of his Legend Walks and he was only telling me about it because he liked me (OK, yes, in retrospect I do realise it was possible he was coming onto me), and that as well as being called Abbot Cathcart’s Pool it was sometimes referred to as Meganthica’s Pool and that Meganthica was the name of the teenage warrior queen who was found in the kistvaen down there during the Edwardian era, preserved in the peat, and that she is still thought to haunt the moor, in many guises, to be a kind of muse, in a way. He told me there was even a song about her, an old moorland ballad, which appeared on an album that had been quite successful in the forties, although most people had forgotten about it. Of course, I said nothing, but you probably would have seen a small smile escaping from the corners of my mouth, if you’d been looking closely.

How are you feeling now, vis-à-vis your retreat from the public eye, and the fact that fewer and fewer people are interested in you and your work? Do you still ever feel the old addiction to attention, that need to have your existence confirmed and fed back to you? Do you miss anything? It’s been a while now.