I’m still in Belfast, staying at the Merchant Hotel, which predictably used to be a bank, yet is now asserting itself as an enclave of Parisian luxury in the heart of Antrim: the Crillon with soda-bread canapes and Guinness cocktails. Even more predictably, I loathe it. No fault of the hotel, you understand, it’s just that as the years go by the theatre of temporary rented accommodation seems more and more threadbare to me: no turn-down service can prettify the thousands of cold sex acts performed between these sheets; no marble tiling can convince me that it’s a proscenium arch, within which my taking a shit becomes a command performance.

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The Wagon Wheels packet crushed into the damp grass on the slopes of Black Mountain bore a faded illustration of a covered wagon travelling at speed, together with the slogan: “Size Matters!” Indeed, it does. I was making my way gingerly down this steep hill, which, along with the rest of the massif — from Divis Mountain to Cave Hill — was imagined by Jonathan Swift to be a giant, recumbent figure. Some say that this was his inspiration for the distortions in scale with which he opened Gulliver’s Travels.

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This week’s issue of the Independent magazine is on the theme of France, which is why Ralph has created this beautiful picture of a statue of Charles de Gaulle, or “Charles the Wall”, as he should more properly be known. The name apparently derives from the German for “wall” and even the “de” is suspect, being not — as you undoubtedly assumed — a nobiliary particle. But then that’s you all over, isn’t it, always assuming things are nobiliary particles without any cause? You probably thought the “la” in Danny la Rue was one, let alone the “de” in Chris de Burgh. Poltroon.

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Why has the annual Easter Egg hunt become such a trial to me? Is it because with each succeeding year I become stronger, fitter, better read and more chillingly orientated? I think this must be so. I remember the Easter Egg hunts of my childhood, which seldom involved more than rooting around a flower bed or worming beneath my parents’ bed, to emerge, dust devils like crazy battle honours on my woolly, the foiled goods melting in my hot little hands. But nowadays the hunt can last for days, cross entire counties and involve me in feats of close reasoning that make a chess game between Big Blue and Kasparov look like a very facile Suduko indeed.

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Ralph sends the attached picture [of a shark] — why? I’ve never known him to go scuba diving and the closest he’s come to a shark — so far as I’m aware — is a euphemism, namely a sharkskin suit that he wore when dancing at the Hot Club de Jazz with Josephine Baker in the 1920s (or was it Chet Baker in the 1950s? I forget). It makes you wonder what goes on in the Steadman imagination. Presumably, in the small hours of the night, the dread horn-honking of minor chords disturbs his repose the tempo quickening, Ralph thrashes in the sweat-damp duvet as if it were the salty sea itself.

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Sophie is trying to house train Minnie, a tiny terrier puppy with glossy black fur. So far as I can discern, Sophie is a perfect trainer: gentle, yet firm. When Minnie voids one of her mousy little turds on the stone flags of the kitchen, or pees on the settee, Sophie scoops her up, taps her on the nose and says: “Oooh! You bad girl! How could you? How could you?” They say a dog returns to its own shit (do they? Who are they, and why do they say such things?), but in this case it’s me who feels a compulsion to return to writing on the subject: a doleful, incontinent scribe, I am, describing the world with a thick stroke, extruded from my dogged pen.

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In Aberystwyth everyone is dressed up as a bunny or a nurse or a Hawaiian surfer, or has had their face painted Kabuki-white. It’s a university town, so some such carry on is only to be expected: yet the rituals of late adolescence seem to me so pronounced nowadays — the rut and glug, the prance and dance; the half-digested pap of US frat. Of course, this is my ritual of middle age: the carp and moan, the self-conscious distancing — as if afraid the knicker elastic of teenage abandonment is about to snap back in my face, yet again.

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