The difference is that I now know eleven things about a man on a pavement, and it took nine mornings, and not one of those mornings was harder than the one before it.
Nine mornings.
I had seven hundred with the other one, and I spent every single one of them on the weather.
One last thing.
In the February I wrote to Ines and asked whether she would mind if I put something on the corner.
Not a plaque. There is nothing to put a plaque on and the council would not have it anyway.
I meant the flower stall. There is a woman who runs it called Perpetua and she has been there nineteen years and she knew him by sight for two of them and had never spoken to him either.
She keeps a bucket of whatever is cheapest at the end of the day and she gives them away rather than throw them out.
I pay for that bucket now. It is about eleven pounds a week and she has never told anybody where it comes from and I have asked her not to.
Ines said yes, and then she said one thing that has stayed with me.
She said: don’t do it for him.
I said I wasn’t.
And she said: you are a bit.
She is right. I am, a bit.
But there is a bucket of flowers on that corner at half past five every evening that somebody takes home, and eleven pounds a week is nothing, and I have decided that a thing can be partly for the wrong reason and still be worth doing.
That is the whole of what I learned in nine weeks, and it took a man lying to me for two years to get me to it, and I would still rather he had just told me his name.
