Old Grenville, what a sad little character he was. Even his name was hardly believable. What did he teach again? Was it literature or language. They were probably the same thing in those days anyway. Strange that I should remember this after all these years...

I look at the grey-blue floor tiles.Something you might expect to find in a cheap hotel.You see a single hair,the presence of a human, curving asymptotically to the crack between the tiles;an upturned cockroach, apparently content in its small death; and a squashed mosquito, flat as a pancake, its body horribly twisted around the centre. All this laid out on the Cartesian grid, or like pieces in a grotesque game of chess.

The rain pelted down. Crashing down on us as we ran from one building, across the rugby field, to the smaller set of buildings where our class had already started. Some of the wiser ones had already decided against it and stayed put. There was always sense in staying still against the flow of the world.But the test had begun and we were already ten minutes late. Somehow we were hoping that the heaviness of the rains would clear us of any obligations, wipe out the next 45 minutes of our lives...

We made a dash for it. Half way, caught in no-man's land, and already the rain had plastered our shirts to our bodies. There's always a stage when things get so bad that you say, fuck it, just carry on...

We make it and stand in our own puddles for a minute, laughing, catching our breath. Inside, the revered silence, what people will later call 'the life of the mind', even though they don't what they're talking about.

There he is, old Gren. Light-brown suede jacket. Sometimes he'd wear an outlandish red jumper. You'd imagine he'd go for a yellow bow-tie as well. Must be gay. But wasn't man enough for it. He has that ridiculous stoop, one side of his shoulder closer to earth than the other, as if he's in this permanent state of apology. Thousands of years of subservience in his blood. Suppressed, like most other people in Wales, there was nothing mythical about him...

Write an essay on...Blow on your hands to get them unfrozen. No words come to your head. How great it would be to write something just now, something not connected to the past, to other writers, to the future; something that could be read and then thrown in the waste paper basket in the corner, the dunce's corner. Duns Scotus and all that. Except, except Grenville, the whole classroom was one such corner. Surprised you couldn't see it...

What do you remember now? Not the words but the rain, the running across a muddy field. You seemed to have spent an inordinate part of your life running. Running back home before it got too dark, or running past the cripple's house...at the corner of the street there lived a man, a very old man, who would occasionally come out in his wheelchair, his trouser legs all floppy and folded neatly back to his thighs; and he wore that army jacket, highly decorated, but he scared the life out of you. Run, and hope to God you never see him.

Down from his house was the old train bridge; covered in so much black soot and grime that it looked like a block of crap and was almost invisible. There were probably loads of such useless old things, places of dark refuge, strewn around the country-particularly up north, since everything up there was dilapidated and shit. And the scale of the arch was not something human beings could relate to either.