Dear Manning,

I’m writing you this letter for want of better ways of continuing the conversation we’ve been having for the past eight years, sustained by weekly letters while I was in Japan. We began to walk and talk in 1983 as you were preparing for heart surgery and I wasn’t coping with a broken heart. You wanted someone to walk with, and I needed company.

When you died at 4pm on a Thursday, I couldn’t stop myself thinking that that hour on that day of the week was when I most often called around for tea with you and Dymphna before we set out for a stroll through Forrest, some days going for more than a kilometre, others barely making three hundred metres before your breath gave out.