removes a breeze block in seconds. Everyone crouches in the canine play position and stares wildly. Introductions are made and nobody is any the wiser and nobody remembers the name of anyone else. Take out another block. OK. And that one there. Well. Max brandishes the Beamer cutting out a gap through which a pit pony could pass. Anvita passes. She looks around and nods and shakes her head. What the fuck is going on? Everyone breathes a bit more. Jaq has a good idea. Ey offers everyone Jägermeister and Lucozade. Ey has been finding out about British drinks. Conversation flows. Anvita crawls back through the hole to fetch the whiskey. Max offers to get pizza. The cold March stars burn brightly over the skies of Fakenham, like in a poem. Plans are made, associations formed. How quickly it is established that we are all in the same boat when we take the trouble to sit down together with Jägermeister and Lucozade. Those bastards. The ones who are not sitting with us, sipping. We’ll show them a thing or two. We need to raise money. Sometimes it takes a stranger to show us what we have in the way of skills and knowledge. Anvita started with the Beamer. Thing the size of a pen that cuts through anything, charged with sunlight. Then there’s the Napkin. Unfold it, place an object on it, cover, whistle the first four notes of‘ All the things you are’. The object is copied. Where there was one there are now two. Loaves and fishes. Anvita’s mood improves. Yesss, Anvita triumphs, not knowing that at that very moment, not so far away – I leave the geography to you, Peter (after all, Simon – Smith this time – has that quote from Donald Davie as an epigraph for his new Equipage book: something about how more poetry is about place that we realise. The book, Salon Noir – confirms that place, to earn the name, is all about food. A place is where you eat. Or drink, though I draw the line at Lucozade. I do realise that this is a little reductive, but then reduction is itsel fan important cooking term so it’s not so easy to slip away from the conceit). Well, I may mostly leave it to you, Peter, but I do like to be kept informed … It might be kinder to you, patient reader– all these yous – if I abandon that sentence, syntactically speaking, but try to recover the rhetorical device of keeping too disparate events in the same focus. It may not work as analogy but it holds on to the fact that these people are, after all, in the same plot. So at the very moment when Anvita trumpets her Yesss! triumphantly, Simon (not Smith) enters her studio to hear the repulsive violence of a No. We have here two agonisms. At the very moment when first and second persons battle it out in the living grammar of this occasion, especially in their possessive
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