And yet, I have practised no magick since returning from Wittenberg.

In the first place, Axel's boat feels altogether too fabulously modern and almost futuristic for something so arcane. I didn't feel there was a suitable space until last night, drunkenly exploring the lower cabins, I came across a small and empty room. There was nothing but a stone Buddha on the floor of the back wall with, as ever, his closed eyes and the smug smile. Was this Axel's meditation room? The fleeting idea of his inner life left me cold as, I suspect, it leaves him, too. I could throw the Buddha overboard (are not life's pleasures deep enough?) and do my invocations, and my evocations, in here. It is pleasingly dark, too.

We caught bream for lunch, Thom and I.

He'll be going to a new school next year and I am raising the question of finishing his schooling in private education. Like many professions, teaching and teachers have been ruined by this government with it's moronic obsession with targets, tables and statistical hygiene, at the expense of nothing less than life itself. Why of course children stab each other in the playground for, if we know anything, it's that life can be denied only so long. And so I find myself honing my arguments in favour of, ready to enjoy the battle with Thom's mother, and the egalitarianism that she, and the middle classes, have now taken to their hearts. I drove Thom home yesterday and saw her, in my wing mirror, standing at the kitchen window. I then had another of my wayward and unaccountable certainties that she has, in fact, been single all this time.