Dear Gabriel,

We went today to the enthronement of the new Bishop of Lincoln. What a magnificent celebration. Two and a half hours long, with echoes of the great medieval ceremonies that ushered in the present incumbent’s seventy-one predecessors. The previous evening I went to the 100th anniversary of the Grimsby Fish Merchants and gave a talk. We think a lot, rightly, of soldiers killed this weekend but I thought today of the 300 trawlers based at Grimsby 100 years ago and of the generations of men who had gone away for weeks at a time to the freezing waters off Iceland. They worked hard and when they came home they worked hard but some never did come home from the mountainous seas.

That night I dreamt I was in a strange town. For some reason, unexplained, there were some dead birds on the ground. It worried me. Then I looked up and saw what I had never noticed before, which can only happen in a dream. Beyond the town was a great circle of precipitous cliffs like the Cirque de Gavarnie in the Pyranees but much higher and more impressive even than that: cleft after cleft, waterfalls, pinnacles rising up to unimagined heights.