I’ve been reading the face of the woman on her knees on Platform Four with her shopping bags spilled around her like a sandcastle ruined by the tide. I’ve been reading the uncertain angle of her head as she gazes into space, blonde hair spilling loose, mouth slack and smeared red. I’ve been reading her enormously vacant eyes: some small madness at the gates. Or perhaps she can see some larger madness approaching that we can’t. Perhaps it’s the rising sea.

I’ve been reading a draft of a musical novel by Kirsten Krauth which pulses and roars with the sound of things being made and growing and being torn down and reborn. I’ve been reading how a music video shot in a Hawthorn rubbish tip in the early 80s turns into a Holbeinian bacchanal of sex and death lit by a burning lake of toxic waste. How one of the ringmasters of that nightmare, now older, lovingly builds instruments from timber over months. ‘How most men don’t issue or embody something other than themselves / How to nurture and create something of their own, bring it into the world, they need to make music.’ Or to write.