In Blackwells Bookshop on Broad Street, I go looking for Ernaux texts. The modern languages section is much degraded since the hedge fund which owns Waterstones took over Blackwells as well. A boxed ‘market’ of ‘sale books lines the inside perimeter of the Norrington Room and foreign language texts are squeezed onto a few shelves in one corner. French, which previously inhabited several bookcases to itself on the second floor of the shop is now restricted to one side of a bookcase. A couple of Ernaux, which I’ve already got: ‘Le Jeune Homme’ and ‘Les Années’. That’s it. But next to her I find a Duras which I don’t know. A bilingual ‘No More/C’est Tout’; writings leading up to just a couple of days before her death, it says in the blurb.

At breakfast, on Sunday morning I am chatting to L and K who are telling me about their trip to Vietnam. Photos of places they have seen. They mention the house of the Chinese-Vietnamese lover, Duras’s lover, and show me a picture. Astonished that MD should come up in conversation I get up and pull the book from my bag and tell them about it. They find this coincidence remarkable. On the train home I start reading it, in French, then English, comparing the texts. Sparest of spare writing. Then I read one of the prefaces which mentions the date of her death, 3 March. The same date as today, now yesterday (now three days before this edit). I quickly photograph the preface and zap it to K, who replies that, not only that, but 3 March in a leap year because the editor mentions 29 February as well, as the date on which Yann Andrea gave him the pages of her writing. This year 2024 is a leap year. “very spooky” I reply to K, “but what does it mean?”

I recently worked out that ghosts interest me because they are positioned at the overlap between fact and fiction. They exist as the accounts that people tell of having seen them, otherwise . . . not? To those who claim to have seen them, they are inexplicable facts. They are practical because they do not take up space. The collective undead do not amount to clutter.

Talking to J about the idea that ghosts look just like us and walk amongst us and we can’t distinguish them from anyone else. Walking along the Cowley Road on Sunday morning I pass a figure in full brown monks’ clothing, which looks rather bulky and neither like tailored contemporary  raiment nor like imitation fancy-dress attire. As I pass he turns with me and when I look back he is facing me. He is standing at a bus stop, making him seem particularly ordinary. I want to take a picture to see if he shows up on the photograph, to test if it’s a ghost, but I don’t because he’s looking right at me and it would be obvious. The ethics of taking photographs of ghosts.