OK, I was having a bad day that day. Anyway, let’s not get too self-analytical about all this. Because in the end that becomes about the ego too, and the ego is what I’m trying to destroy, at least partially. Also, you’ve heard me talk about all of this too many times before.

I don’t mind. I like hearing your stories.

Doesn’t the village look pretty from up here? I’m just going to climb right up to the highest rock, because obviously you can’t hike to the top of the tor without doing that, it’s against the rules. Then I think if we go directly in the direction of the second buttock hill about two miles over there, we’ll be somewhere near where Craig said the spot was. It’s weird: you know, sometimes when I’m up here I feel like I’m walking on a man’s face. I remember Reka saying when she came back here for the second time, from Hungary, and then when she came back for the final time, from Canada, she loved the way the village could surprise her when she chanced upon a new angle to view it from. I suppose this is a very familiar angle, though. I am looking down now and thinking, ‘That looks like the kind of place I’d like to live,’ and, guess what, I do! That’s kind of cool, isn’t it, don’t you think? And isn’t that mist nice? The way it’s below us and the sun is breaking through it and the sun seems kind of below us in a way too. Oh my god, I think that is my actual shadow on it, wow.

That is known in weather folklore as a Brocken spectre. It comes from the Brocken, which is a German mountain that tends to be very misty: a place where that often happens. With a Brocken spectre, you also often get what used to be known as a glory, which Coleridge and Wordsworth both observed in their time in the Lake District, where a psychedelic selection of colours form around the shadow of your own head, on the mist. This is usually part of a mistbow. And all this is very quintessentially autumnal, which reminds me that it’s October right now, which – and please forgive me for labouring this point – seems quite a late and chilly time of year to be diving into a river on a moor, and that maybe it should be postponed until next summer, if not longer.

It’s quite curious: at first I just used to think you were merely a source of factual information, but now I feel like you also might be my conscience too, or maybe a parent, or an invisible brainjournalist relentlessly interviewing me for a double-page feature in your head magazine.