It seems ages since I've been able to write anything to you about Ed and Frances. Did you miss my little narratives?

You've never said.

And my absence from your mailbox hasn't been because of any particular lack of drive or a loss of desire to write but more because of the dislodgment of myself and chattels across to the other side of the mountains; the move itself dislodging many fears and imaginings (or so I have thought up until now).
Then the two years of rebuilding a house and trying to build a new part of my mind as you said I should. Maybe you've read my diaries on the Internet, I don't know.

And you know, on reflection, I thought that much of their story revolved around living in Tuscany, in my little cottage with the brown hinge. And moving as I have to my new house over the mountains had taken more out of me than I had ever imagined. The house was a ruin when I originally found it and I'm almost a ruin myself after two years of hard labour rebuilding it. I decided too, (maybe conveniently to agree with you?), that E&F were a state of mind, an illness of mind if you like, caused by isolation and a certain embitterment of emotions, a lost love and a dispersed family. I had friends to be sure but my life was really centralised around my animals, Bessie and Leone, the chickens and of course E&F and it was they who determined my behaviour patterns. This is what you told me. Easy huh, all this for you? I had begun to think like them (or so you said); one day like a dog, one day like a cat, then a chicken but most of all a spider. Yes you presumed to know how spiders think which meant you thought they think.

But a greater part of me wonders whether you ever really believed me and my stories and experiences, and I see now, looking back, that to doubt was a clearly reasonable reaction on your part. Because after a year living in these mountains I can see my mind as you saw it. It is separate from me and I'm not so sure if this is a good thing. How did you describe it now? 'Unhinged by a brown hinge', yes that was it.

So here I am again writing to you as I look out across the mountains topped with January snow. And I'm going to tell you what is happening. No, not in the old way, but in a rational way, I promise. I'll only report what is happening.

And this is what is happening.

I've been putting off for a year the building of a website. It's difficult stuff to learn and twice as difficult to do. And three times as difficult to get it right when it goes wrong. I wanted to learn how because I wanted a website which was mine and which I could control, like a painting, like you would feel about a painting.

It's a website about art.

I was on line a lot getting advice to lift me out of some technical hellhole or other when I was hit by a virus. Or so I thought at the time. A goddam virus. So, picture this, it's the very darkest part of winter, the snow is coming down in flakes as big as poodles, I'm cold, tetchy, I go on line and get hit by a computer virus which goes straight to the hard disc.

I was foolishly trying to get on to some obscure search engine; (do you know about this stuff? It's pure hell out there).... And it says, in a pop-up box, 'let us introduce you to Matilda, our search friendly spider' and I click OK and Bingo! All my LED lights flicker for five minutes and then zilch, blackout.
Two weeks in the Computer Hospital in Sarnano and the technician leaves a message on my answer phone that it's OK to pick up, nothing wrong with it was clogged up inside with some stuff or other, insects get inside sometimes he says and lay eggs.

And that's where it begins again you see.

I'm only relating things as they occurred remember, nothing's going to come from my imagination because it got dangerous last time, you said so.

The new bathroom in my re-built house across the mountains has an equally new shower box. It's made of non-cling glass which means it doesn't steam up with moister or droplets.

I know Ed and Frances are there.

I do, I know it.

So I take a shower and sing an old Everley Brothers song, word perfect and in tune.

Look! I never even liked the Everley Brothers. You know me I'm a REM type. And I swear I never have known the words of 'All I have to do is dream' (and I'm thinking at this moment I'll try and get a back album on the Internet. I am, I'm actually thinking this).

Now can you imagine this of me?

But in the shower, I was telling you, I found them. Behind the multi option giro tap, the gap I never bothered to fill with silicone. And they are looking at me but more intensely then they ever did and they are humming along. Humming along to The Everley Brothers.

Ok it's winter and it's getting colder as the snow sweeps down from the mountain and here I have a large old fireplace and it keeps me warm and I have everything I need like music, friends, good work etc. but there was something missing and it was them, I know it now, Ed and Frances.

And here they are, back with me.

You are going to tell me not to go there, that I have the choice, that this time there might be no going back. And now I have to tell you that I must go wherever they take me but that I want you to be a witness.

Can you take this on?

Do you want to call me?

You don't have to.

I feel calm and I hear music but it isn't mine.

And it's like music I have never heard before in my life.

It's a sort of celestial digital reworking of 'All I have to do is dream'…