― Something very strange happened to me today as I came out of the homeless shelter in the small hours. An ill wind blew from the sea and I wished I had camped out on the beach instead, but then I remembered they don’t let you do that anymore for fear you might soil the pristine waterfront. The joggers don’t like us. They want to look out over the sea and feel good about themselves before they disappear in their glass cubicles to make the world go round. As if. The strange thing that happened wasn’t a thing as much as a woman in pyjamas, who seemed to have lost her way. She reminded me of Virginia Woolf. You know who I mean and you get the picture. She drifted past me like a specter but I wasn’t drunk and I knew that she was real. As I looked, she turned round, came back and stood in front of me just like you now, only closer, much closer, so that I could smell her womanhood. Man, I was hungry, I was tired, I was sick, but that made me feel so good, I can’t tell you. She said only one thing to me hardly opening her lips, said it to my bare, stubbly face, which made me feel as if I had brushed against fine gauze: ‘You’re lovely, Gary’. She said that, I swear, she said it twice even and it made my day.