You assume they're dolls and fill their lives with your conclusions, don't you. Tend to, don't you. Whoever it is. Looking out the window in the front room watching your dolls walk down or up the pavement. O yes.  You know who they are. You know who they are better than they do. My point of view is self-defence maybe, my life maybe, what I do perhaps. Is it viable, is it defensible? No, it isn't, but nobody knows. I know my life is making it up, I'm perfectly aware of that think you, and so there is no point in criticising me, water off a duck's back.

I go out there sometimes for provisions. I've got a boyfriend who sometimes visits me and whom I sometimes visit. Don't call them boyfriends anymore at our stage of life, which is quite far on, the time when you know the end is coming, appeared like a speck of dust at the end of a long tunnel, but you don't know when it's going to reach you or when you're going to reach it. You call them friends. He is my friend and I am his friend. "I'm going on holiday with my friend" or "I'm going out to dinner with my friend".

He walks past my window almost daily. He knows I'm watching, he gives me a discreet wave, look, there he is now, coming down the street, carrying his placard. I wonder what it says today. I try and guess always, when I see him down the street approaching, it's a test of my eyesight, like trying to read number plates at fifty yards, what's it say? O yes, I think I know, O no, I guessed wrong, I can see it now, plain as day, the weather is rugged this morning, so he's getting a move on. Sometimes the content of the text is plain as day, sometimes it's obscure. Today he is brief, concise, to the point you might say. No ambiguity. None whatever. I clap softly as he strides proudly by, remembering to give me his little wave.