I've lost it, my capacity for novels has been hugely diminished after a recent forced diet of essays and belles-lettres: beloved Hazlitt, Lamb, Chesterton. Owing to what I desperately hope is a temporary dwindle in my attention span, I now need to interpolate spurts of surfing the Net, absently trawling stray articles, picking at the Economist which I took 2.5 years' leave from, conjugating the 10 French verbs I know in preparation for the Alliance diagnostic test (can't wait can't wait), wheedling along like a crippled giraffe through the fan ti foreword to my Qi Baishi monograph.

Been chuckling with tender indulgence at the "decontextualised debris" (YQ) of my Modern Art. For any piece of twiddled-with junk there will always be a corresponding community of credulous loons who will acclaim it as groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting. For the dogged and inveterate semioticist there are golden principles and radiant ideas to be extracted from anything. And in the end all we have is this: on one side, the bandying about of insolent, slenderly tenable slogans; on the other, affronted counter-electioneering for the vacuity of all this modern rubbish. Thus has the artistic dialectic of our age become fiercely partisan, fractured along strands of belief which are as fickle as fashion. But it generates discourse and colourful opposition. The pseudo-mystic passionately broadcasting his singular vision, the pursuant legion of reverential disciples, the outraged traditionalists upholding a dead aesthetic: what is this but the endlessly recurring, age-old wrangle between the establishment and the evangelists?