Iona Reid

Ask me what the Practice is and I will tell you about a book. Somebody brings in a school atlas with the spine gone. You take it apart, you find the sewing is sound and only the case has failed, you make a new case, you put it back. Four hours. The child gets the atlas back with the same stains on page forty.

That is not an illustration of anything. I do not want it to be an illustration. The moment I start saying the book is like a person I have stopped mending books and started giving a talk.

I am wary of how easily I talk about this now. Twenty years and I have the phrases. A visitor asks a hard question and I hear myself produce a sentence that is smooth, and correct, and does not cost me anything to say, and I do not entirely trust it. Halloran was right about that and I have said so to him.

The bread is genuinely bad. I want that on the record separately from everything else.