**Gustave Doré, The Inferno, Canto XIII, 1861**

For reasons I prefer to keep private, I have not written a publishable sentence for over three weeks. The hundreds I wrote for intergovernmental organisations and fashion houses don’t count. Nor do the two sentences above and, truth be told, the dozens that follow, including this one, which, admittedly, falls well short of being even remotely interesting.

Entirely unrelated, but perhaps significant, on the day I ceased being able to write sentences that might matter to a broader audience than policymakers and sellers and buyers of expensive frocks, watches and perfumes, I was presented with an olive branch – not extended in peace or as an offer of reconciliation. Nor as a sign that the floodwaters had, after 47 long years, resided, for this extended branch was too long for a dove to hold in its beak — a full fathom long, the size of the one Odysseus and his men heated in the fire and ground into the Cyclops’ eye.

Master of the Johnson Assumption of the Magdalen, **The Adventures of Ulysses: The Blinding of Polyphemus, C. 1500**

I, however, did not receive it through cunning from a one-eyed human-munching monster while holed up in the cave of Polyphemus. I was given it at the threshold of my front door by a man named Eric, whom, in previous posts, I referred to as Fred for reasons that now escape me.