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descended.—‘You see!’
    ‘Why don’t you get rid of that jacket?’, says W. ‘You’ve been wearing it for years. It makes you look fat. It’s completely shapeless’.
    W. and I are wearing our flowery shirts. ‘Look at us’, W. sighs, ‘fat and blousy, and everyone else slim and wearing black’.
    What’s wrong with us? Why are we never dressed for thought? Take my trousers, for example. They should be pulled up round my waist like those of Benjamin in that famous photograph. But they sag. They droop disappointingly.—‘You’re a man without hips!’, says W. ‘A man without ideas!’
    I’m getting fat, of course. Eventually, I’ll have to wear elasticated trousers like the American professors, W. says. Perhaps it will suit me, my obesity. Perhaps it will give me gravitas.
    It’s too hot!, I complain. W. reaches in his man bag for a wipe. W.’s prepared for the heat, he says. He watched the weather forecasts. ‘Dundee is either very hot’, he says, ‘or very cold’. He reaches in his man bag for suntan lotion, and applies it to his cheerful face.
    W. is an enemy of sunglasses.—‘Take them off’, he says, ‘you look like an idiot’. But it’s sunny, I protest.—‘They block your pineal eye’, he says. ‘It needs sunlight’.
    The pineal eye’s in the centre of the head, W. explains, but it’s sensitive to light. Without light, you quickly become depressed.—‘That’s why you’re so morose’, says W. I’m morose, he says, whereas he, who doesn’t wear sunglasses, is joyful.—‘Joy is everything’, W. says. He is essentially joyful.

 
    ‘I’ll bet it smells terrible out there’, says W., looking out of the window of my flat. ‘It does, doesn’t it? You can tell. I’ll bet it really stinks’. You’d never know of course from inside the flat, he says, because the windows won’t open. They’re jammed shut, I tell him, by the flat changing shape. It’s sinking, I tell him. It’s collapsing in the middle.
    Later, W. helps me empty the cupboards in preparation for the damp proofers. We have to strip the flat down to a bare frame, I tell him.—‘God, what’s that smell?’, asks W. as he sets down the pots and pans I pass him in the other room. ‘These are filthy’, he says. ‘How could you let them get like this?’
    W.’s worried about my cough.—‘The damp’s turning you consumptive’, he says. Even he’s developing a cough, and he’s only been here a few hours.—‘How can you live like this? How can you get anything done?’
    W.’s house is perfectly made for work, he says. His quiet, book-lined study on the second floor; his desk and laptop; the view over Plymouth roofs is perfect inspiration, he says. He has a sense of living above the world rather than living below it in the mud, as I do.
    ‘All your worldly possessions’, says W., looking round the room. ‘Is this what you’ve amounted to?’ Pots and pans, sticky with filth; rusty tins of mackerel and tomatoes; a duvet soaked in spilt fabric conditioner: ‘Yes, this is what it’s come to’, W. says, ‘it all ends here’.
    I must have a death-drive, W. surmises. That’s the only thing that could explain it. I must, on some level, want to destroy myself.—‘Just throw this stuff out’, W. says, ‘all of it. You don’t cook here, do you?’ There’s no power in the kitchen, I tell him. There’s no electricity.—‘My God. How can you live like this?’, says W., his voice high with incredulity. ‘It wouldn’t have got this bad if you lived with someone’.
    It’s no wonder I don’t do any work, W. says. He couldn’t work if he lived like me. Out all the time, reading nothing and living in squalor. It really is disgusting, he says. And the damp! He’s never seen anything like it, W. says. It hits you as soon as you come in. No wonder I’m always ill.
    ‘What would Béla Tarr would think of your damp?’, W. says. ‘What would he make of it?’ W. has become obsessed with Béla