Teaching Hospital


From a tangle of travels and journeys, I find myself returning to my old alma mater to attend a guest lecture of some kind. The place is so much more overgrown than it was — with trees and chalet-like houses amongst them. When I'm inside the building where the lecture's to be held, it turns out to be the foyer of an enormous teaching hospital, the refreshment zone for a shopping mall. But the corridors are more like in an art museum, even to the prints of old houses in Japan. I approach the receptionist and ask for some guidance, but now she's an arts administration officer and proceeds to write me a handful of cheques. I protest that it wouldn't be right to take them. I don't have anything to spend them on; but she insists, telling me to go and buy a car. At which point I realize . . . and another day begins.