Inertia’s comfort fans an abstraction to return to his birth country after lengthy exile. He yearns to climb stiles when rambling across sodden fields, smell dockweed alongside those winding roads explored in 1984 when he descended from his rented attic rooms, leaving a borrowed TV’s engulfing coverage of future warning, Orwell’s reputation now somewhat battered recently.  His own vibrant present then, albeit frugal, is now his tantalising yesterday. He has found his old lair on Google, feels the wind’s bite, rain’s lash, before ducking his head into the tiny ancient pub, smells again a shiver of centuries in the walls of the empty village Norman church.

He sees his former roof in colour, the path, frostbitten one winter’s morning when his woman’s camera fixed him holding his stopwatch returning from a daft run. He recalls white breath under a swirling sky, the heavy fall of her brown hair, her belief in his dreams that withered into remnants, chagrin warded off with glossed memory. No Google then but bowered reading and writing he wants to rediscover, a quickening of his heart to thunder with dark joy again, feelings he knows deep in the map of his bones from that time when he was never more alive.

Although its politics, its downtrodden poor, moved him to anger, he loved that land so different from most of his antipodean experience of quiet erasure, a fettered life since those far-off days. His years depleted, he fantasises dying there, near old woods where, in soft shadow, leaves curled as ...