I say if he can weld, then he can damn well take a job as a welder. From an immigrant! Illegally.

Two things I hope for this Christmas:

• Chocolate orange
• Ham

We’re sitting here like the last piece of chocolate on top of a quivering blancmange surrounded by rapacious office workers.

ablaze with light and luscious caramel and rose-
coloured wrapping and ribbon, and I walked in:
alone, as though on a vast steppe (plus I suppose
the artisan himself). And then I balked: in
a splendid cabinet rested an array of eggs,
dense and dark and sparkling, and muralled round
with incantations long and lovely as your legs,
and more intricately patterned and profound

than the river I’d just traversed.
I spent about a hundred quid, I think (it felt
like more at the time). As I left the shop a burst
of cold wind hit me and sunlight fell full-pelt
and I knew I was right to give up my old existence.
I walked back to your flat on Cambridge Rd.,
it was two, ten, a hundred miles, it was any distance,
it was SW11, it was Narnia, it was any postal code.

On two or three days out of the five I have to feed myself downtown I go to a cheap pizza place on Pender. It’s $3.75 for two dripping, oleaginous, vaguely repugnant slices, and I get a free slice for every ten I buy. The radio plays pleasant Indian airs. The proprietors welcome me warmly and sometimes we exchange pleasantries. I enjoy this interaction, because it has encrusted itself onto my daily routine over a very long period. There is usually a beggar standing outside, a mundane-looking man with a short ginger beard and a submissive posture. I give him money roughly once a fortnight.

Ever since I began reading Victorian fiction, I’ve wondered why the characters, especially the women, are so prone to fainting. I can’t believe that all of the fainting is Victorian novelists exaggerating for effect: most were intelligent and would have expected their works to be subjected to this kind of posthumous scrutiny. No, I’m convinced that women back then really did have a chronic fainting problem. So why was this? Partly of course it was the various poisons in the air and water: lead, cholera, asbestos, the blue funk, etc. There was also the weight of expectation on the 19th century woman: play piano, bear children, play piano, more children, more piano, play bear, piano, children, etc. Their life was a never-ending vortex of offspring and Haydn minuets. And they were always subject to that bodily pinging sensation that nineteenth century physicians called nerves; and the best thing about Victorian novels is the way they mention disease – polite for mental, blunt for physical.

In view of the description given, may one be gay upon the Encantadas? Yes: that is, find one the gayety, and he will be gay. And, indeed, sackcloth and ashes as they are, the isles are not perhaps unmitigated gloom. For while no spectator can deny their claims to a most solemn and superstitious consideration, no more than my firmest resolutions can decline to behold the spectre-tortoise when emerging from its shadowy recess; yet even the tortoise, dark and melancholy as it is upon the back, still possesses a bright side; its calipee or breast-plate being sometimes of a faint yellowish or golden tinge. Moreover, every one knows that tortoises as well as turtle are of such a make, that if you but put them on their backs you thereby expose their bright sides without the possibility of their recovering themselves, and turning into view the other. But after you have done this, and because you have done this, you should not swear that the tortoise has no dark side. Enjoy the bright, keep it turned up perpetually if you can, but be honest, and don’t deny the black. Neither should he, who cannot turn the tortoise from its natural position so as to hide the darker and expose his livelier aspect, like a great October pumpkin in the sun, for that cause declare the creature to be one total inky blot. The tortoise is both black and bright. But let us to particulars.

- Melville, The Encantadas, Sketch Second