—the word’s on the tip of your tongue (or, as you say it, tong), as we take tea. Waiting for you to speak, I sip mine: Tetley’s tastes of nothing, but I suppose it’s good to know true flavourlessness, the prose of life we sugar over with verse. Ceylon you say—a trochee not an iamb— referring to the drink I drink with two spoonfuls at home and, here, none. Though by ‘home’, I mean the house my parents live in and where I grew up; like, and unlike, them saying ‘back at home’ when they intend Sri Lanka, and not Leeds where they live and I haven’t, not for years.