All of us compose our works in a dream, even if we compose them while awake. And ‘the man from Porlock’, the inevitable interrupter, inwardly visits all of us, even if we never have visitors. All that we truly think or feel, all that we truly are – as soon as we try to express it, even if only to ourselves – suffers the fatal interruption of that visitor who we also are, that person from the outside who is inside us all, more real in life than we ourselves, than the living summation of all we’ve learned, all we think we are, and all we’d like to be.

Reading Pessoa’s essay ‘The Man From Porlock’ reflecting on the visitor who, Coleridge records, interrupted the composition of ‘Kubla Kahn’, but caused it to break off, I was interrupted myself by my Visitor, but in an eminently pleasant way …