I was unable to begin a short diary/memoir until, 12 days after a hip operation, I began reading a novel I had written a few years earlier. I had to reacquaint myself with it for marketing purposes. This was The Second Birth of Anaïs Balanchine. The story begins with the heroine, like me, incapacitated in hospital, though in her case, a psychiatric one. Still, there were plenty of similarities. But the revelation I experienced, re-reading it after the nausea,  trauma and pain and days of recovering mental clarity, was that I once again slipped on the invisible cloak of the author as I traced my own words, my own choice of metaphors, my own organic stream of consciousness. In effect I metamorphosed back into this other me, the fantastical traveller, the writer whose intoxicant is the desire to make sense of his world.

And thus my fingers began tapping on the keyboard