I wandered off from a tour of the White House, and bumped into Laura Bush in the library. After an initial moment of awkwardness, we started to talk about books, and I decided she wasn’t so bad. As long we didn’t get into politics.

She gave me a tour of the residence, and offered me tea, and I thought things were going well. I was going to broach the topic of ‘The Husband’, because friends owe it to friends to point out poor choices. But as I looked at a painting of Lincoln I overheard her out in the hallway telling a staffer to call for security, and have me dragged from the building.

My feelings were hurt but I didn’t say so; I slinked off into the gardens. There were dense bushes clustered beyond the carriagehouse, and I sat down in the mud at their center, listening to the crackle of radios around me, everyone trying to find me but none of them knowing my name.

In a wrought iron chair at a cafe on the shoreline, rustling the news in a language I don’t read, I try to explain to a woman who insists that she knows me why ever I moved here to Wales. As we talk the waves grow higher over the rocks in the mouth of the cove, swallow it whole before rushing past in their run up the sand. “We’re going to get wet,” I tell her, and ocean eddies around the claw feet of our chairs. I lift my feet in their slippers, dangle them over the flood and wait for it to recede.

“Why Wales?” she asks again.

“Because some of the words in this paper are about to make sense,” and the pebbles along the sea edge chatter like teeth as a spent wave crawls back in.