After a Cork Italian dinner (ravioli quite good; salad vinegar best used for cleaning windows), I dreamed we were going home from the beach carrying a leather-bound book. Sections of the book detached in the wind and clusters of pages bundled out across flatlands behind the dunes. I gave chase, ending up in a café with huts nearby, one of which was occupied by a young woman. I needed to pee; there was a queue; when I finally got in, after the pleasure/pain of a long deferred pee, I saw through the slightly open window my father smoking a joint. As I left, shielding my face, I heard my father say, That looks like Judy. I went into my new friend's hut, locked the door and crouched down on the floor. It's my father I said, I just saw my father, that's why I locked the door. Wait till I tell you about mine, she said. After her tale I stood up and there outside the window my father stared in at me with a face neither his when younger nor his at all, so blank you couldn't say was this fury, contempt or terminal incomprehension.

I needed to read the apple and walnut chapters of Roger Deakin's Wildwood after that, sitting in the evening sun, leaning up against a pine tree. I needed to be in the fruitful, honeyed centre of the world, that is, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, bringing in the harvest, standing under ancient trees, or reading about Roger Deakin doing so, then going to find an apple in Garravaghstan, where I live.