Background Music

You may be in a café reading when, after the intro, Billie Holliday and Easy Living lure you out of Walden and swing you in a trance out of the café. You may be watching Shaun Evans as Morse mostly to marvel at the mimicry of his body language, so like John Thaw’s, when you’re torn away, this time by Puccini, away from the spires of Oxford to fall, to fall as Tosca falls, defences fall, that your heart breaks open a dungeon door and griefs like prisoners crouched on the floor bestir themselves and infant griefs like dolls sleep through a bell that tolls and tolls and tolls.

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