It is an incredibly sad thing that of all the dreams I have had in this life, the one that persists is that of the cottage. I have these other, more intense dreams, like the ones where I catch trains to remote corners of the country for a living, or sample suspicious-looking food in a strange land, wondering whether I have time for a puppet show in the evening before I take a boat to, oh, somewhere else. Those are the kind of dreams that linger and gnaw till I know I must find some way of getting to the person I see living it up in them. The cottage is something else altogether, an old sock lying underneath my consciousness for ages. It has always been there and I don't have the heart to get rid of it now, perhaps because I know that somewhere in the end it is where I am meant to be. It's a calamitous thought at times, the fact that I'm studying for a degree and dreaming of bigger, grander things, and acting out award acceptance speeches while in the shower, all in order to build a perfect little cottage in the mountains with a fireplace and a never-ending library and a paved pathway lined with rhododendron, and live in it till I'm hungering to run away again.

Sometimes it seems I shall spend my entire life loving things intensely for a while and then abandon them for newer things. It's the most reassuring thing ever, barring maybe bread-and-jam, which is the kind of love you can carry with you to your pyre.