There’s a half-eaten piece of vegemite toast stuck to my chest. I roll over to check my phone to see what time it is. It’s …a.m. There’s an empty Hydralyte sachet sitting on it that must have been necessary to someone. It’s important to stay hydrated while drowning your sorrows. And so we come to our last night together. Or rather its morning after. As I remember it, my loves, we’ve had some sort of simpleton train-ride through orange orchards and graveyards, much in between. I have had you, you and all your sisters, now. All nine. And, to be honest, with the greatest of respect, it was hard to tell one from the other, at times. I suppose that’s to be expected. We might need another daughter of Mnemosyne. The muse of Clarity. A Spinal Tap model, one that goes up to eleven. Anyway, it’s best, in my final assessment, to remark only upon how you left me feeling, rather than describing all those crimes we hatched and executed together. Scenes of a lingering drunktank arraignment, an Irish dissident giving lip to a curmudgeonly judge before she’s held in contempt for speaking way too much truth. She is beautiful in the way a nylon string guitar ballad is played, perfectly just a little out of tune. It means what a blunt pencil and sauce-stained napkin do to a dirt-poor kid with that tiny spark in him, and it also means a set of folding deckchairs with beer-holders, a lukewarm tinny, watching the fires of Notre Dame peter out. For the greatest thing you impart, my loves, the most important lesson you all teach, is this: never be born of something big; all our stories are small.

Remember that.