He didn’t identify with anything or anyone but felt sure dragons would understand him. He cut out a map from a school history book—which he shouldn’t have done and which bothered his soul—that had pictures of monsters where the oceans spilt off the edge of the world. And then there was another map that a strange and distant ‘academic’ uncle had given him—a reproduction he stuck over his bed that had words written in Latin that went ‘hc svnt dracones’. On and in that map he found his future as an iconoclast—a defier if not a defiler of maps and mapping, and a wanderer who claimed he could be nowhere because he had no rights to anywhere.

But that was down the track and a long way off, almost outside time and space in terms of where he ‘was at’ as he stared at his new map. He would investigate further by asking questions—though he preferred being asked questions to asking them—and looking in big bricks of encyclopaedia volumes, and discovering the edges of Roman conquest tipping into ‘hic sunt leones’, and he knew that for him, given dragons weren’t real, that lions held the truth.