Have you ever felt like you’re the only person in the world who cares about something?

What if you were? Some reckoning. Guernsey is a quiet corner of the world. More accurately it is a dot drawn onto maps because they missed us on the first pass. I feel as a son of this dot a certain duty to pencil us in. It is the great asterisk of my life and my charity dries up. Rock, field, sea, divorce, tax-but-not-much—I’ve got the t-shirt and that’s what my t-shirt says. If you have a t-shirt you can burn mine. You have to paint it for people. Every time I try to paint the thing but a painting is a painting and a thing is a thing. Sometimes a thing is so remarkably itself you put down the paints and laugh.

I will paint my home for you. From the BBC, ‘Non-native grey squirrel on the loose in Guernsey’. Later, ‘Islanders told not to gather around squirrel’. Later, ‘Mystery over grey squirrel in 'impossible location'’. Later, ‘No squirrel sightings since last week’. Some time later, ‘'Elvis' the grey squirrel thought captured or dead’. Some portrait.

A squirrel buries a chestnut. He leaves the mound. He returns to see a great oak tree. He misses the chestnut.

In the Half Moon I’m painting Guernsey. I’m with Guerns and we’re painting together, painting for drunks. We’re drunk too which is why the paints are out. We present the arm of Gilly. Gilly needn’t paint because he is a canvas—tattooed on his inner forearm is the island: a funny triangle. The drunks look at the forearm for a long time, at the ink and the space between.

"How many people live there?"

"On the island?"

"On the island."

"64,000—give or take. But they’re all dying."

Their gaze doesn’t leave the forearm.

"There’s no way."

Their gaze doesn’t leave the forearm.

"There’s no way that many people fit on that island."

Scale. We’re hot with laughter and then we cool down. Nothing happens for very long. This can’t go on any longer, you think, and then it does or it doesn’t. Guernsey has little roads. Really they’re lanes and they’re very narrow. Often you find yourself driving down a road which is clearly only wide enough for one car and you just hope and pray that another car doesn’t come round the bend. Sometimes I think, wow, I really don’t know what I’d do if a car comes round that bend. And sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.

‘An animal charity has said it is "highly likely that something has happened" to a squirrel thought to have arrived in Guernsey via a vehicle’. Clarity.

It gets so dark there. It’s so green and the water can be so still but it gets so dark. How to show you the darkness I know—how to stop you seeing. I talked to a man about his garden. He said he stopped watering. It’s just too dry, he said, too dry this year. Weather’s too coy.

Who’s job was it to catch that squirrel? I mean, really. I get that we don’t employ a literal squirrel-catcher but surely that falls under someone’s remit—some charity or agency or department. I’m not even a staunch squirrel-detainist—let that fucker run—you'd just think someone somewhere in some office would have an ecological concern. And then it’s not that big an island!

This is where I write from.

Night, and quiet. This nasal form. And then the waves.