Dear Linda,

Dear Linda,
Having just cycled home from a very hard day at work, followed by an especially materialistic diversion to Sloane Square, ( the sordid details will follow lower down this page ), nature was taking it’s usual course & I was absolutely bursting, but / &, your letter was laying irresistible & inviting upon the door mat & so I read it with instinctive urgency upon the toilet, thus experiencing two incomparable & simultaneously synergistically energising pleasures; truly, O Wise One, the best things in life are free ! And before you ask;

a) there were 88 words in the first sentence, and
b) I tend to use my right hand for just about everything.

At Sloane Square in Chelsea there stands one of this noble country’s greatest monuments to what Saint Karl Marx called the cult of Commodity Fetishism, the Peter Jones department store.

On Friday afternoon I went there furtively to buy … an Olympus C70-Zoom, I'll put in a picture when I learn how ! ( see above )

Yes, Mother-Superior, absolve me whilst I confess that I have mortally transgressed & have abused my sacred credit card big time ! Now don’t point that pretty finger this way, or even waggle it that way ! The very last straw that drove me to the brink of insanity was when you mentioned a yearning to take some pictures, so it’s mostly if not absolutely all your fault & I can still make an effort to sound almost reasonable when I refute any suggestion that I might have been greedy & / or materialistic; I’m just a silly & suggestible soft touch ! Now, all because of your damned intrusion into my sanity, I’m going to have to spend hours reading the manual because digital cameras are not half so simple as good old fashioned film cameras. Amazingly, you only get a little instruction manual in the box, because the proper one comes on a compact disc, all 190 pages of it, as does the software for downloading & then filing & editing the pictures that you want to put into your computer. I’ll just leave off from writing here for a few moments ( hours ! ) to see if I can master that basic task. Perhaps I’ll go out for a little while & actually take a few pictures ! After all, why else should I want to own a bicycle ? // This morning I woke with a shout from an all too vivid dream. I was walking along a dockside, wearing a grey suit, bare footed, & carrying a pointed shovel, when a gust of wind carried me off, away from land & higher & then higher. Looking down, I realized that the water was too shallow for me to survive a fall, which was when I cried out so loudly for “HELP !” At least I didn’t bang my forehead on the wall this time ! // STOP PRESS ! The Loved One & I have booked a flight & three nights in a four-star hotel in Lisbon, flying out on the 17th February. She is already knee-deep in guidebooks. If you have already been there, do feel free to make suggestions about cheap thrills. I’m going to stop now & catch up on domestic duties.

XXX each from Tristan