Before I left London, I had some odd, not to mention almost mystical, encounters. Perhaps it was simply the befuddlement of drink or too much postponed grief but I had headed to Leicester Square to do an old-fashioned act. Some inverted homage to the generations of Irish who took the cattle boats to the UK. Never to return, swallowed up in Kilburn, on damp building sites, in Kentish Town and dead pubs and Cricklewood and death sentence boardinghouses, six to a shitty room.
To book passage home on the ferry.
No online booking, just the physical action of getting a ticket over the counter, one way only. The music of De Danann and the Leicester Square Odeon; it was showing Fifty Shades of Grey.
Nostalgia through utter nonsense.
A homeless man looked at me beseechingly, utterly silent.
I
