I have had a fortnight on the couch in Hammersmith to recover from Croatia, which is to say that I have had two solid weeks of bad sleep, slightly too much red wine in the evenings, and the kind of long quiet days where the brain finally starts to sort through what it has been carrying. What I am ready to write, today, is the part of the story that comes before Croatia. Not the actual breakup — that one needs another month and probably another draft and I am not yet up to it.

It is the first day of November and the trees in Clapham have decided, all at once and as one, that they are now ginger. I walked to Brickwood this morning under a canopy that’s gone the colour of a fox, ordered a flat white, sat by the window, and realised I haven’t written one of these in nearly six months. So this is going to be a long one. You may want a tea. Since the last time I wrote, I have been to Cambridge in a Nissan Micra, Barcelona for my birthday, Manchester for