Correspondence

   Thesising, getting one's hands dirty digging up research, weeding, pruning, growing, seeding, watering and prancing about in one's own post-doc project sandbox and real gardening out there in the open air has a lot in common.  I dallied with the idea of applying for a real-life job as a consultant writer at a railway 'Firm' as my dear departed mother would have called it. He has a 'post' at a 'Firm' all allusions to fixed stable structures. Well, I think perhaps I will dabble in the spading my own earth bit, first. The point is, that it is an awfully difficult decision to make and at the same time a frightfully easy one. Well, first you have to have a friend called Neil. Some years ago when I treated Neil of the glen who had a fresh air observation on most things, to a treatise on the postcolonial misery of Lankan history and utter charm of its characters, he stated in utter faith that I would always work on something extraordinary. Now this compass h...

    "From the position of the bed, my side recalled the place where the crucifix used to be, the breath of the recess in the bedroom in my grandparents' house, in the days when there were still bedrooms and parents, a time for each thing, when you loved your parents not because you found them intelligent but because they were your parents, when you went to bed not because you wanted to but because it was time, and when you marked the desire, the acceptance and the whole ceremony of sleeping by going up two steps to the big bed, where you closed the blue rep curtains with their raised-velvet bands, and where, when you were ill, the old remedies kept you for several days on end, with a nightlight on the Sienna marble mantelpiece, without any of the immoral medicines that allow you to get up and imagine you can lead the life of a healthy man when you are ill, sweating under the blankets thanks to perfectly harmless infusions, which for two thousand years have contained the flower...