The words are different to what they are sometimes but that is OK. In a way, it’s just another kind of repainting the world. Actually, the words are nearly always different, and you’d probably be hard pushed to say precisely what the original ones are now, but the tune is always the same, even when the tune is sort of different. I don’t remember when I first heard it. I know it was a long time ago. A long time ago even for me. Maybe longer than anyone would think. Remarkably it doesn’t seem to have lost its appeal through overplaying. What I have realised, though, is since the pylons went up, I find it harder to tune into it. There’s some static in the air – something beyond the hum that everyone hears coming from the power lines – that distorts it. I suppose this is the way everything works: you gain something but you inevitably always lose something in the process. You gain a double fridge-freezer and an Apple Watch but you lose the ability to perceive the ghosts of time passing through the air quite so clearly. You gain an SUV to take you to your shamanic appointments more quickly but lose your sense of humility and respect for your fellow human beings on the road. You gain the ability to very quickly look up where and how tall the world’s biggest pylon is (the Zhejiang Province, China, 1,213 feet, more than 50 whole feet shorter than me) but lose an unspoilt view millennia old stretching down towards the English Channel.

I have learned to accept the giant black legs in me now. After all, it is not exactly like I have a choice in the matter. They still hurt, probably just as much as they did on the day they went in, getting towards a century ago, but the pain is different now: I have, I suppose you might say, kind of subsumed it. It happens to us all in time. None of us are exempt from that pain. You get a throb or an ache or an injury or an illness. Then you realise: ‘That’s absolutely part of me now, that pain. That is now an element of my unique voice, playing this familiar tune.’ So you move forward, because it’s the only choice, because getting back to the place before the pain turned up is an affront to nature. Even though the idea of ‘nature’ is up for debate, the idea that that is an affront to it is not.