Today I am nothing more than a figment of your imagination. I am not here, tapping away at the keyboard, but am, in fact, elsewhere. Which is really quite odd and, while utilising technology to fill a gap in presence, it merely serves to confirm the power of presence in the written word.

When you think about it there are few things that hold as many possibilities for communication except an eye to eye meeting. With the written word there is direct communication, it has a freshness every time it is read for the first time, even if the writer lived a thousand years ago. It is always a dialogue, even when it is a monologue, for the reader brings as much to the reading as the writer to the writing.

The written word has a power to convince and can be used for the deepest, most open levels of communication, or it can be no more than a mask, a persona behind which the writer hides. It can transmit knowledge, make you laugh or cry, sway opinion… yet none of that is a substitute for personal experience.

So, while I allow words to hold the fort in my absence, where, you might ask, has my defection taken me? What am I doing with my day? Am I allowed to gallivant when my days are spent largely bound to the keyboard, or at the mercy and command of the dog and her tennis ball?

It will begin early… around four thirty in the morning with the dog… out in the pitch darkness… on a long leash. I am not risking madam deciding to hare off through the undergrowth. Chasing a black dog under a black sky in the middle of nowhere is no way to spend a morning when you have to be on the train for six . I’ve been there… played that game… It’s not happening. No matter how much fun she thinks it is. Not that I am depriving her of amusement… my younger son is coming to play and Ani will love that.

An hour to London… probably another hour to get across it, racing through tunnels ‘like a mole on speed’ as a friend once referred to it, then a day of learning and School business.

Yet, come the evening, the defection will be complete. I get to meet another ghost in the machine. Hopefully. Disasters permitting. So far every time we have tried to meet something has come up, or gone wrong… or it has simply proved impossible. So, in spite of all the years we have known each other, the long, deep conversations, probably hundreds of emails… in spite of having written a book together, we have not met. Yet.

No, I haven’t lost the plot…well, no more than usual… I’m making a serious point here. Personal experience. There is, after all, no substitute for the sense of presence of another human being. And, the Fates permitting, tonight I will finally get to meet my friend.

Fingers crossed!