‘And what,’ he wrote in his diary that evening, as a response to some points he’d put to himself a few days earlier, ‘is the benefit when you do get there? Is there a perfect midpoint between feeling the cold indifference of the world and losing freedom and judgement through commercial success and the people surrounding you who will no longer tell you the truth about what you are doing? (Not that I speak as someone facing a choice between the two at this exact juncture in my life.) Everything went so hazy today I lost sight of where the water ended and the sky began. In the quiet, a gull skimmed the water – or was it sky – and the tiny distance between its beak and the surface never wavered, as if measured by some highly evolved internal calculator. You could believe for a moment that this was all there was in the world: this watersky vapour, stretching for eternity, and this bird. Exquisite. I would like to bottle it somehow. I think this, in the end, is the great challenge, once you can write the tunes (which, really, anybody can, with time and effort): the bottling of something else. Something that’s not even yours but that’s not another person’s either. Something on loan from the earth.’

Closer to the weekend, people arrived and unlocked the doors of a couple of the huts on the cliffside. An old man, his face entirely ringed with coarse white hair, came down from one of the huts and swam naked, striding into the sea with all the confidence of someone reclaiming a swimming pool he had dug out with his own gnarled hands. Afterwards, the old man caught and cooked mackerel, the smell drifting down tantalisingly to where he sat scraping the last flecks of disillusioning Marmite from the jar. Later, he heard hammering from the old man’s hut, metallic and dauntless. While he listened to the old man hammer, he hacked into his hair with the scissors and threw the clumps into the tide, wondering when and how and where they would biodegrade.