As usual, the ample top of my dining table is strewn with books, pens, and newspapers. This is where I do nearly all of my reading. The newspapers are always the same: the current issues of The Economist and The Jackdaw, the only two to which I have been subscribed for years. Ever since the last issue of The Jackdaw arrived a week or so ago, my eyes regularly find their way to a small black-and-white photograph of a nude by Gerald Kelly, which was banned sixty years ago by prudish council chiefs in Newport, South Wales, and which recently went on display once again. As the editor of the newspaper puts it, “the girl featured was plainly flighty—not only did she have nothing on, she was relaxed and smoking!” One of her heels tucked under her crotch and another swung behind her back, she is unmistakably relishing the painter’s attentions. A nubile strawberry blonde in her mid-twenties, she is quite a delight. But this has little or nothing to do with my own attentions. Minus her head and the cigarette in her hand, she looks exactly like my beloved when we are at our closest. Which is why my eyes have learned to studiously avoid the odd details. To tell the truth, I find them rather ugly, too.