Twelve hours later I’m still being stalked by this film. The Mexicans Are All Right I think it was called. A withering portrait of self-absorbed adults from the point of view of two adolescents, if I have understood correctly. In one scene – surely a fable in which the audience is meant to recognize itself – one of the adults realizes her Third World employee had been enjoying some sneaky glimpses of her adulterous romps while he should have been working in the garden. She’s unsettled by his expression and challenges him. ‘That’s not a look,’ he says. ‘It’s my face.’

Whatever. I woke this morning from the richest dream-world I had been in for a long time. I was briefly flung together with a former partner. We were both so concerned not to give in to our old feelings, there were some tender caresses and a strip of flesh, but mostly we circulated independently during what seemed to be a holiday reunion weekend. We were out and about, catching performances at a festival of some sort, then returned to a house our friends had rented. Or perhaps it belonged to the parents of one of them. There was some uncertainty about the sleeping arrangements. Nervously, I bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time in months and smoked one. I went out and came back as it was getting light, a little drunk and dripping wet, frantically trying to locate my bag so I could put on some dry clothes, in the end finding only a shirt that wasn’t quite long enough to be decent.

The epilogue featured me sitting on some steps in warm sunlight. I was in the centre of a small town, among people I knew, taking photographs of their children, and some poorly-dressed kids I hadn’t seen before, who unexpectedly walked into shot. ‘Street arabs,’ I called them, hoping they would not miss my irony.