Bokelskere.no

But in the taxi home, there's an epilogue of sorts: my wife, mooning our of the window at rainy Regent's Park, says, 'God, do you remember those sirens?' and, still looking away, she reaches for my hand and squeezes it.

Strange, how such a moment grows in value over a marriage's course. We gratefully pocket each of them, these sidewalk pennies, and run with them to the bank as if creditors were banging on the door. Which they are, one comes to realise.

I was thinking of the miserable apprehensions we have of even those existences that matter most to us. To witness a life, even in love - even with a camera - was to witness a monstrous crime without noticing the particulars required for justice.

How many of us are completely free of such scenarios? Who hasn't known, a little shamefully, the joys they bring? I suspect that what keeps us harmless from them is not, as many seem to believe, the maintenance of a strict frontier between the kingdoms of the fanciful and the actual, but the contrary: the permitting of a benign annexation of the latter by the former, so that our daily motions always cast a secondary other-worldly shadow and, at those moments when we feel inclined to turn from the more plausible and hurtful meanings of things, we soothingly find ourselves attached to a companion far-fetched sense of the world and our place in it.

Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?

Much of the subsequent days and nights was spent in an agony of emotions and options and discussions. It is truly a terrible thing when questions of love and family and home are no longer answerable.