Started writing again, and thought I might share it with UV, seeing as DP helped me get off the ground in the first place!

It could be a library reading room. Several men, some in suits and ties, poring over texts, heads bowed. Early evening sunlight casting geometric shapes on the walls. Silence, except for the occasional whisper of a turned page, or the harsh cry of a crow on the windowsill.

Your eye travels round the room, taking in these greying, learned readers, many of them retired or senior professors, who have gathered together for a weekend to edit educational texts. And it comes to rest, registering just a faint sense of surprise, on an elderly man sitting in the far corner. Diminutive, bony, long-bearded. He wears a high floppy woolen hat which topples rather comically to one side, and sits, quiet as a shadow, engrossed in his text. At a distance, his eyes appear closed. Perhaps he is actually sleeping gently. And why not? It’s been a long day, and the subject of our gaze is after all approaching eighty years old.

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