1. A woman is standing in the yellow grass paddock, a hundred yards or so from the other activities. We walk towards her. The glare is bad and the woman has her head down but as she raises it you can see she is smiling. When she lowers her head she looks down into the shallow round basket she is holding in front of her at waist height. As we reach her we can see her hair shining, almost dazzling, in the glare, and the things in the basket. There are things which at first look like a lot of similar flat coloured shapes lying at random on top of each other at various angles and leaning against the inside of the basket. As she asks us if we’d like to buy any of these, we notice amongst them, small green, orange, and black combs, thin spirex notebooks, wooden fans with pink and green ribbon threaded through them, and black and silver books of matches.

2. Sitting at the table in the white room, with your back to the window, you look onto the hall through a doorway. Above you at the table is an imitation old lampshade with a dark fringe hanging from it and some velvet material draped around its top edge. The shade is on the end of a long piece of flex which has been caught in the middle and pulled across to the centre of the table from the centre of the room. The wall in the hallways is dark green and at night, sitting in the white room, the light in the hall looks brown and soupy. Perhaps there is an old yellow lampshade or light bulb giving out old yellow light but the light in the hall can’t be seen. On the green wall is a row of clothes hooks and on each hook is a brownish heavy piece of clothing. You can make out sleeves, belts, hoods, tassels (probably of scarves), and collars. The material on each hook looks identical – grainy and brown like a shadow but it is hard to say whether each item is an item in brown light or a piece of brown clothing exactly like the others around it.

3. The table is laid for twenty people. It is in a large austere room furthest from the one wall which has some windows in it. The windows are tall with long dark curtains and face south. The understated richness of the table and its setting are not immediately obvious. The tablecloth is dark red velvet which seems almost black in its shadows and drops to the floor. The setting for each person consists of heavy gold knives, forks, and spoons, a small black china plate with a thin gold stripe running around its rim, a red napkin folded in a rectangle across the plate, and two black glass wine glasses, one the larger of the two, a round shape and the other, tulip- shaped. At each end of the table where there are no settings, there are two identical black conical vases with dark red roses in them, the kind called ‘black’ roses. Between the two ends are black prismatic salt and pepper shakers and sauce jugs of various sizes arranged in clusters at every second setting.

4. It was a perfect day. I walked up through the garden terraces on the hill, in parts, on the roofs of the blank white-washed houses. I came, finally, refreshed rather than tired from the climb, to a house which seemed to stand naturally at the end of the path. Its glass doors stood open at the last terrace. The room beyond was almost as light as the outside. Inside the room were plants similar to those growing on the terraces, simple vines and small flowering shrubs, some slender chairs, and a large table with glass, china, brass and silver things on it, almost like an informal shop. The room was full of things, each one singular and extraordinarily beautiful but it did not seem cramped or over-laden.

5. I am sitting with my back to the window facing the mantelpiece where there are two boards with the same photo repeated many times on them. On one board the photos are coloured, on the other they are black and white. Each photo is like a still life painting with a vase of yellow flowers, a feather duster, and a white cloth on a table, obviously arranged. On the table is some sugar in a large plastic-topped Moccona coffee jar with its label still on it, a pepper grinder, a very small black radio, an ashtray which is an old glass jam dish and a postcard. This is how it was yesterday. The postcard shows a section of an ancient Roman wall-painting where

four women in different positions, sitting, standing, kneeling and bending over, are shown against a bright red wall. They are clothed, partly clothed and naked. The table, like the postcard, contains and unifies its contents.