always seems to be one roll away. Was I close, truly, or was it an unbridgeable chasm of might-have-been? It’s galling, that not-knowing, all the pathways with no retracing, just the click of your steps stumbling ever-forward, the tug of the future at your sleeve, an annoying host dragging you from room to room. I try to make future wait, freeze time like Jef Costello lounging in his black-walled room in the titles for Le Samouraï, sound of tyres in the rain and his caged bird’s chirrup. But the clock won’t stop and there’s no hiding, not even in the Paris backstreets or the ocean untamed, it comes knocking for us all, brings the priest and doctor running over the fields in their long coats, as Larkin warned me long ago.
