Carson McCullers, my dear! Loneliness, loveliness, transgression, humidity and death in the deep South, pass the chocs! Peel me a grape!

Anyone who is a slurred, lisping, queer, drink-marinated, deft dissolver, not to mention dead, is a friend of mine.

Profound sense of own ingrained, utter ordinariness engulfing me. I’m off for a Ferrero Rondnoir, that’ll make me feel special.

Can you judge a book by its cover?

I once found a nice Hogarth Press large-format paperback copy of William Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity” that some chump had dumped out in the rain, completely sodden, utterly soggy, virtually returned to pulp.

I took it home and conservateured it, drying out the pages, one by one, by turning them daily as the book sat limp and gasping on the radiator.

Gradually it stiffened.

On the cover is a fabulous black-and-white photograph of the lined face of Empson himself, stretched and weirded-out by the sheer g-forces of his queer and drink-marinated vision.

So that is he!

Previous, po-faced Pelican editions of this great book – which dates back to 1930, for Beelzebub’s sake – had no such image on the cover and one ploughed through the pages with clod-clagged labour.

But read with the slurred, slightly lisping, ever so camp tone of voice of the face on the cover, the book came to life, literally.

He is a big fan of Swinburne and talks of his ambiguities expertly and deftly dissolved in the immersive properties of poetry and verse.

May I say your own tone is infinitely more Molly than Flatt, drenched in fresh meanings that rain effortlessly on the hot brow and longing limbs of those who hunger for stimulation & satisfaction in this over-heated, dazzlingly lit retail space we wander lost around in, parched and blinking.

Dagmar: Ah, Swinburne. I love that comment from Wilde: “a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestialize”. I fear we have a few things in common.