From the Notebook Last Bits (part 2)

• I’m observing with unfocussed eyes a caravan of ants on the ground and feel bad and guilty about the smile that lady gave me just now. She smiled so sweetly. Doesn’t she know how evil I am? And thy, ant folk? Dost thou not know either? I may not trot on thee, or on thine offspring, but thy should not expect rain from me either.

• When I close my eyes, I see little balls of gold. No, not gold: a material more beautiful than gold. Shinier, yellower, pearling with a powerful opalescence… and yet it has to be a metal. But it is alive too! That element should also exist in reality: I feel it is an injustice that only I can see it with my fictitious eyes.

• Sometimes, I see in my imagination everything going really fast… mountain ranges shooting up, plants taking root, crumbling down the rocks to gravel and boulders. Rivers, chafing the pebbles into fine sand, washing it down to the bottom of lakes, where it clumps together and forms new minerals with dead beasts encrusted inside. All in a matter of seconds.

• Yes, the plants are in bloom. The carousel is happily spinning round. The girl with her wet hair puts on a little warm vest now that the evening is creeping in.

Palms are waving and colourful boats are bobbing up & down in the Harbour. [A man, who looks uncannily like Eric Cantona, has rolled a cigarette from which gallant tufts of tobacco are sticking out.]

Families are sitting on the beach and laugh… but before you know it people get transported in cattle wagons again.

• I think I haven’t laughed all day today, except just now when I saw a photograph of Barbara Cartland carrying a Pekingese dog under her arm.

• 'M.'

It is a city like a city. With folk traipsing past rotten windows. Poop and plastic on the streets and here and there an angelic girl…

Whereas I was thinking of sinister bars, filled with thugs and bullies, unshaven, barbaric and silent… Of given-up lives, and people who didn’t want to be found… I was thinking of whores and violence… tormented looks, lustreless consciences… And mythical idolatry… worshipped statues dragged into the streets… Wild women following their gods with flaming eyes.

But instead, I see tourists, sun and churches. I spy with my little eye uncle policeman… the old harbour, a kitschy golden statue on a church on a hill and a few beggars more than usual.

• A whole month alone in the countryside… it’s a one-way ticket to the funny farm.