The fleas are falling.

I don't know how I'd have coped without the O.

I woke early and spent an hour in bed wondering if the itch on my ankle was psychosomatic and deciding that if I could resist scratching my leg to the hollow bone, then the fate of my life might be wholly other.

I toyed with my good news. It seems that a minor school of integrative psychosynthesis is running a seven day course in London. The locally known Mark Van Gogh has cried off and they've asked me to replace him. It's all shadow/soul work. While I find the Jungian individuation process bracingly metaphorical, the imagery is dull and embarrassingly adolescent and yet, lying in bed nearly comatose with ego dystonia, I warmed to the idea of working with the primal, even if it is only the howling of youthful cosmopolita.

The offer was plainly the return of a favour but it took me a long while to trace and it was only when I understood it went back three years to the alibi I provided for the entirely disreputable anon (and that anon is the second favour I have done him), that I finally lunged for my legs and scratched like a cat.