Middle of the night, I hear these voices in my head or are they, because when I throw on my pants and follow the sound I find it located somewhere else in the house, so on I pad down to this room, and there is this growing cast of characters all sitting and standing around looking, well, ill and agitated and one of them says, ‘Oh, so you decided to wake up,’ and Charlie steps out of the shadows, ‘—we were beginning to think you had given us up.’

‘If this is a union meeting,’ I demand,…

Alice is quite the opposite of me, more of a social butterfly who appears superficial and impulsive, in the restless way she flutters about a crowd in a room being witty and attentive but that is because she is self-contained by her intelligence and judgment; whereas my melancholy exterior presents me as stern and puts people off when, I suppose, partly because I pulled myself up my the bootstraps and am largely self-educated what I need most of the time is reassurance whenever I fall off a…

What disturbs you most about returning from a front where poverty has developed its own economic system based on the waste of Westerners, or where war is an industry; is the clarity with which you see through the complexities of your own world, where consumers devour the fodder of Goliath corporations that warp the minds of the people on brands and logos in the holy name of democracy, and governments send their young to war while bleeding their families dry through taxation and we, the…

Traffic is quieter driving through Dublin at night since the world woke up to its liabilities, and we cruise without hazard along the quays of the Liffey towards the M50 turnpike where, joining the southbound lane for home, Alice, seemingly mellow and perhaps contrite says, ‘Charlie, all I’m trying to say is that if you jump out of the knife box the rust will set in and getting back to what you have now might not be easy. People move on, form new alliances and there is always somebody coming…