That’s how it was: a surreal mix of personal vendetta, painful memory, astute political protest and a local resident’s complaints. I noticed that the letters got longer as the weeks passed, starting at a paragraph or two and expanding to thousands and thousands of words. In the most recent some of the fantasies and conspiratorial thinking I remembered from ten years earlier re-emerged, in spirit if not in letter. Lizards made no appearance: now a secret eighteenth-century
