I was learning from him the power of suggestion rather than demonstration; of evasion rather than enlightenment; of giving only one fact – or really just the rumour of a fact – and then letting the reader invent everything around it. I was without being aware of it, learning to distract from the truth by amusing the reader; to flatter the reader by playing on what they believed to be their virtues – their ideas of goodness and decency – whilst leading them ever further into an alien darkness that was the real world, and perhaps the real them, and on occasion, I feared, the real me ………….. And every night when I thought I was washing him away I was deluding myself. For he was entering me, and there was nothing I could do about it. I sensed it, how could I not. But I ignored it because the worlds were beginning to come. He was entering me and there were more and more words, and with each word somehow less and less of me. I was a man unmoored, once more adrift in a wild sea.