Mish, I’m throwing in the towel not with a sense of defeat but rather a sense of pastures new (sunny uplands even). We’ve reached nigh on fifty pages, and in print the lines look straight and true, as beautiful (almost) as the new steps fronting the Leavey Building (church end). It’s time to run the thing off and let it stand on its own fifty legs. Not as a work of art, granted, but certainly as testimony to the strength and power of the epistolary form. But whoa! I must rein in my logorrhoea lest I stray into the realm of melodrama. My final shot goeth like this: a cold coming I had of it this morning lugging my corpus to the desk. A local access road was closed and I was forced to trudge through a barren field before I could rejoin civilisation and proceed to Dublin ’s heart. The field was rocky and frozen and populated by a large flock of Stymphalian birds who tracked my steps with dagger glares. At least I think they were Stymphalian birds though they may have been ...