As I’ve mentioned before, for many years, living abroad, I have kept a kind of informal journal not as a record of daily events but as a storehouse of various thoughts or ideas or observations that come to me during the course of a day. We all have those random thoughts, but most of the time they arrive in the middle of some other activity and are of a fleeting nature, and generally we turn back to the task at hand and forget them. I therefore took to the practice of jotting them down, sometimes using a single word as a reminder, ensuring they wouldn’t be lost. It was fascinating to go back into this computer journal, years after I had written in it, and see the sometimes intriguing, sometimes ridiculous things, that had crossed my mind. In particular,
