down Cuckoo Lane. There’s an arch bridge to scythe it off. A ghostly spot, it struck me, but that could be the Washington Irving I’m reading this week, storms trapping travellers in baronial halls, the branches of the garden oaks rapping on the casements. If you walk a lonely lane like this, you might hear a twig snap, footfall behind you in the leaf mulch. Or is it your imagined self, a glitch in your neuron folds trying to assert the spectral figure of your own placement in the universe, a flicker in the machine?
