I love the rainy, sometimes sunny climate of the moor and its border villages: the pockets of weather that can vary so radically from valley to valley, the clouds that sink into vases of deep green land, do their work to help maintain that greenness then tumble on to their next appointment. I like walking in the rain here and I like seeing what it does to the plants in my garden. I like the way footpaths and streams are often interchangeable. Water was a very decisive factor in my decision to live here: the deafening rush of the stream, the taste of what came out of the tap, so immeasurably more flavoursome and soft and refreshing than what I used to drink in Oxford when I lived with Mike. ‘Yep, that’s it,’ I thought, the first time I drank it. ‘That’s what’s been missing.’ You go and get some chips in a nearby town. You walk along the street in the town with your bag of rain and, strangely, you don’t mind it, because you’re very hungry after a long walk along the high shouting river, and there are some chips in there too right at the bottom of the bag, just a few, beneath all the rain, and they taste good, because everything tastes good after a long walk in the rain. Water is in your entire being here, altering it, influencing the taste of everything. I so often have rain and sea and river in my hair and damp pebbles in my shoes and cuts across my stomach and chest from when I scraped them against rocks when I leapt off other rocks into water. You feel it all even more after a summer that some other British people told you was dry and hot, not realising that the South West Peninsula is not really in Britain, and that weather is different here: cooler and damper in summer, warmer and damper in winter, rainier almost all of the time, especially recently. If you can’t see the moor, it’s raining. If you can see the moor, it means it’s about to rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Water. Water. Water. It’s so much the theme of my life. I even used it to kill Mike. I didn’t say? I killed Mike. I didn’t. But I did. I told Reka I found the doll today. She said it was OK, that she knew I knew, and that we could all be friends: me, her and the doll.

Ah fuck. Rain. The song again. Such a nice tune. She has got really good at it. I’ll explain it all better when I’m well.

DECEMBER