Anyway, this book will be about her, not me. I’m trying to annihilate the ego, remember? Also the painting isn’t the original, so it’s not actually the future pension fund you might think it is. Ooh, I love this bit, it’s like getting close to the roof of the world. It’s where everything starts again, I think, where the clouds and rivers renew it all. Listen to the water here. The noise is different. It’s different to down by the house. I was talking to Sue, who lives down the road, and we both said the same thing, that we listen to the river when we’re in bed and have the window open and sometimes we wait for the noise to stop; we forget it’s not a shower or a sink being run next door, and then we remember it’s never going stop, that it’s just going to keep on renewing itself, keep being the same but different, long after we are gone, and maybe that’s obvious but it’s also pretty wild, when you’re close to it and experiencing it and realising it. Oh wow. Look at the pattern of the stones in the bottom of this uprooted tree trunk. Don’t tell me that’s not art. Imagine the sound this big gentleman made when he fell.

A beech. 172 years old. Came down in December 2094. Nobody actually heard the sound. But it still made one. They always do. Just to clear that up.

How do you know this stuff, but not some other stuff?

I don’t know. I also know that Toadpit Lane is called that because there once used to be a pit full of toads down there, but I suppose that is self-explanatory.