Today, at the end of a very heavy week, I took two deep breaths of fresh air, one literal, and one literary. The literal breath of fresh air was an early-morning walk in the arboretum at Tervuren with the dog. I am posting a picture I took on the way back. Walking along this avenue of beech trees, their upper branches limned by the rising sun, felt like walking along a cathedral nave and, I am sure, such scenes subliminally inspired the anonymous architects of perpendicular gothic fan vaulting (Bath Abbey, for example). At lunchtime I went to a poetry reading organised by the Northern Ireland Executive office in Brussels. Two young poets, Miriam Gamble and Ben Maier, did not disappoint. The latter is also a singer and musician and sang for us as well. Gamble’s poetry is rich in arresting concepts. One that has stuck in my mind is ‘an underwater tear’. Maier, coincidentally once Gamble’s student and then her tenant in Belfast, builds structures (a series about the circus, for example). The one that stuck in my mind was a sort of invented, poetic, history of cotton. I walked back on this balmy day feeling refreshed and stimulated and ready to attack the dossiers and issues lurking balefully in the office…