I don’t mean just that he had recently gone blind—although he had, courtesy of an ill-judged bar fight in Soho—but that while he was blind in the present, his memories included visions of the recent past, so that if he looked at a shopping list he would see nothing, not even the vague outline of the paper and his hand, but when he tried he could recall it perfectly, in memory. The damage to his brain had made him blind to the moment, but left him the past. That is what I have now. I remember walking downstairs into the lobby of the hotel, handing over my gold coins with the knowledge that this was what I had wanted them for. I remember the look of pleasure on the manager’s face at this massive overpayment. I remember calling the British embassy and asking if they could assist a young genius on his uppers, and finding that the ambassador was a frantic Ethiophile and a fan.