In springtime the ruins are a blaze of contrapuntal colour: wild gladioli of magenta, bright yellow inulas and spiky acanthus thrust up among sarcophagi carpeted with tiny blue saxifrage and sprawled over by convolvulus with great pink trumpets.

We are dealing in the Iliad with a commanding vision of man, articulate in every detail, not with a tale of adventure automatically or discursively carried forward.

To complete this catalog of thermodynamic processes of importance in shallow seas, the phenomenon of cabbeling should be mentioned (from the German ‘Kabbelung’, see Horne et al. (1978), usually pronoun[c]ed in English with the emphasis on the second syllable). Because the equation of state of water is nonlinear, the density of a mixture of two water masses of unequal temperature (and possibly salinity) is greater than the arithmetic average density of the two components. Thus surface mixing of adjacent water masses of differing characteristics generally produces water locally denser than its surroundings, which tends to sink. Sinking motion so generated is referred to as ‘cabbeling’.

When, as happened several times that season, I was asked to address some particular topic, I would explain that as I hadn't five minutesworth to say just then on anything except my novel in progress