Hark! List! The addled tread of a confused soul approaches. Hear how his smooth-soled slippers skitter and slide upon the varnished floorboards of life, gaining neither purchase nor comprehension from his travails.

Halt, I say. Halt. Stay a while. Fear not; your bepuzzlement is a mere figment of perception, a windscreen besmirched with the dung of the pigeons of bafflement. Pause a moment at this junction and permit me to slosh grey suds across it and scrape it a little with my explanatory wiper.

This place (he gestures around in the general direction of everywhere) is merely a repository for my idle scratchings, the metaphorical bureau of the frustrated writer. Scraps, passages, half-finished missives, beginnings, endings, middles and – sometimes – wholes. There is no particular order to them (unless clearly indicated in the title by the use of a basic numbering system), no ranking, no relevance, no importance. Pick and choose at will. Sample, taste, swill and spit, lest you are intoxicated by the words and lose your sense of literary gustation.

Charles Fort said (or wrote, or possibly said and then wrote, or possibly dreamed, then said, then wrote) “One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.” This universal truth, being universal, holds here too. Begin where you will and stop where necessary. The circle hence shall be measured and you will know its dimension.