Thin winter sunlight in the late afternoon picks out the pale green on the bark of trees starkly lit against the rainclouds. I am walking down an avenue towards Victoria Park and can see the far banks of the Mersey south of Liverpool, grass, woodland, as it would always have been, and, almost as a matter of course, I wish I could see the whole scene in some pristine and prehistoric form and, as usual, wonder about the origins of this desire. Is it some form of misanthropy I am unable to acknowledge? Or is it just this city, this conurbation, and its history? Or neither of these, perhaps, just the longing, the need, for some image of original innocence but a need set off by these ugly neglected streets, some pure image of the soul, always spoilt. I walk on down Derby Road and pass St Catherine's, the hospital to which my desperate parents came in the late forties, pushing two children in the pram, to seek shelter after their eviction from their rented room and, as usual as I pass that way, I try to imagine that scene too, my mother retching on the yellow fish they brought her in the public ward, realising she was pregnant again. My father had to go to a separate ward. He must have been in despair, homeless with a beautiful wife and their little family. They went to my grandmother's house and made it officially over-crowded and got their own council house after some months, in Bebington, a mile from woods and farmland descending from a spine from which you could see both the Mersey and the Dee. My mother still lives in the house, alone, where once there were seven of us.