I am lying face down in a brightly lit sixth-story room beside a motorway on the outskirts of Istanbul. As I breathe through a hole in the examination bench, a team of two (polite, friendly) medics are making the first of 9,400 incisions in my head. And yet really, I am not on the bench at all. Really, I am not even in the same room. I am someplace else, somewhere not too far from here, it will turn out, flying over the heads of villagers all dancing in rows, swooping across the vista before me like the boy from Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman.

I am tripping. Perhaps that much is obvious already. The general anaesthetic administered by the medics (with skill, tenderness) has taken spectacular effect and briefly, I am sucked through the webbed edges of consciousness into the Foreverrealm. The

See Full Page