foreword When I learned that we were going into lockdown I decided I mustn’t fritter away the unexpected gift of a bracket round life which the virus had imposed on us. What I needed, I felt, was a project which would be absorbing yet not too demanding, partly because anything really demanding, like getting down to a novel or even a short story, would probably be impossible for me in a time of extreme anxiety and uncertainty; and partly because such a task, were I to attempt it, would, I knew from past experience, make me an extremely difficult companion to be with and I did not want to inflict this on my partner. I decided then that I would keep a diary for a hundred days and that I would follow this every day with a short thought or memory, one a day, connected to a person, place, concept or work of art that had played a role in my life. These could not, in the nature of it, be perfect little essays or perfectly rounded autobiographical fragments, but rather a way of talking to myself in order to arrive somewhere I could not have arrived at without the day’s work. And a hundred days, I imagined, would probably take us to the end of, or perhaps a little past, the lockdown. Vaguely recalling Tony Rudolf ’s delightful memoir of his early years, The Alphabet of Memory, I also decided that I would allow the alphabet to trigger these thoughts and memories. Despite the fact that as a constraint this was fairly weak, since I would get to choose what topics to write about under each letter, I thought it might push me to revisit areas I might not have thought of had I written either randomly or chronologically. It might also, I thought, be interesting to see what sorts of juxtapositions the alphabet would throw up. And this indeed proved to be the case. I would not have thought of writing about Agami, the little resort near Alexandria where 9