It’s a golden window night
Not one to be alone
The seagulls sit together
The wind and the weather
My face stings warm, my body wrapped
Wind through the needles
My heart is cold and hears none of that
Children and Mother running
Running to their door
This night is too big for one man

I’ve neglected you.
I know, it hurts. I suppose I should have known too.
It’s only now, now that I’m back, that I see you, that it really sinks in.
I put a lot of work in to begin with, you know! You and I went really far together.
We did and saw some amazing things, you were so full of promise.
And then I got tired. I let you linger.

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I was a lucky kid when it came to food. Mum, until recently, wasn’t an outstanding cook, but she did well enough and threw in a bit of variety and we did eat out quite a bit and what with travelling to Asia quite often I’ve never had any problem with spicy food and things like that and find myself having problems with whoever does.

Up until recently there have been two foods which I’ve avoided throughout my life, even running hell-for-leather just to avoid eating them. I had some food phobias.

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July 26th; Today is pretty much just a travel day. We jump on the coach and hit the road for a long time. We did have a stop on the way to Lyon though. Wine tasting in the Beaujolais region.

We got there and a hilarious dog, which I named Roberto, came up to greet us. It was a sort beagle looking sausagey dog. It was quite old. He just wanted to lie around. I gave him a scratch. We went looking for toilets, as often happens immediately after disembarking a bus. We found one, which a group of twenty or so people were lined up for. One of the reps of the place told us that they had more down the hallway. I followed them, with several people following me, to the end of a hallway. I don’t think they noticed, because they went into someone’s private room and shut the door.

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July 25th; It is our free day. I have a public transport pass. We seek out the dead first in the catacombes of Paris. They were once Roman limestone quarries that fell into the hands of the French and were filled with the bones of those who were crowding the cemeteries.

Others sought the dead that day too; my last sight of Ryan was looking baffled in face of a map. He wanted to find Jim Morrison’s grave. The catacombes themselves are wonderful. The stairs descend for what feel like many more than five floors into the earth, and from there empty tunnels stretch for many kilometres. In total there are some three hundred kilometres of these tunnels beneath the city, and over six million people buried within the catacombes, though only a stretch of these are open to the public. Kate was scaring Ben as we walked through the first tunnels. They dribble off almost endlessly into blind corners and then dribble on again. A few items of graffiti adorn the walls, though they are largely bare. And then some sculptures carved by a once-sailor, once-caretaker, now-dead man, of various ports he had visited in life. They were from memory.

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