'you, lifted into the sky like in stories; gone, the way we expect people to vanish into thin air in faked magic...'

  

 Winter. It made things visible.

'...a fictional boat, moored safe and ruined both at once in its own eternal bay, is less doomed than we are. We’re as doomed as the Cutty Sark itself, tall, elegant, real, mundanely gathering the London sky around its masts and making it wondrous, extraordinary, for the people coming up out of the underground train station in the evening, the ship-of-history gracious against the sky for all the people who see it and all the people who don’t even notice it any more because they’re so used to seeing it, and just two months to go before there’ll be nothing left of it but a burnt-out hull, a scoop of scorched plank work.      

We are doomed on land and doomed at sea, you and me.'