Writing this on the bus. The BUS.

Engineering works, so: a coach. Forty of us herded off the platform by a man with a laminated sheet and no interest in questions.

The coach smells of hot plastic and somebody's Pret. There is no table, so you hold everything. The suspension was designed by a person who hates the human spine. We have taken a route through what I can only describe as a retail park archipelago. A child two rows back has been playing the same three notes on a recorder since we left and honestly, good for her, at least she has got a project!

I could not read a novel in this. Sentences would not survive it. What did survive it is Chatwin, because the thing is built in fragments — ninety-odd little pieces, most of them a page or two, and you can start and stop each one inside a pothole. A skin in a cave. A Welsh chapel in the wrong hemisphere. Somebody's terrible uncle.

Whether any of it actually happened is apparently an open question and I've decided not to care.

Eight. We got in fifty minutes late and I've chosen to blame the recorder.