Kpunk, great, on his holiday in Wales

Glad to see Mark’s coming off the anti-children/anti-animals trip a bit. Children, they’re mini-Lukas, true psychogeographers, virtuosos of micro-perception and being-here-now. Seeing with the wide eyes of the child is the definition of grace for me (look, i am a child of the Sixties--but then so were Deleuze & Guattari). The "inner child" is the most precious part of the self. I don't think I could relate to anyone who’s really completely grown-up. Of course, children can also be a total pain in the arse, true, little monsters of selfcentredness. But it's a childlike versus childish division. Weirdly, adults who lose touch with "child-like" seem to become more and "childish", like grotesque overgrown dis-enchanted kids. The easiest remedy for encroaching syndrome is to have kids of your own.

The latter is also a very salutary reconnection with the mammalian continuum, a reminder that 90 percent of you is animal. So when when Mark writes about how in a "step towards ILG [intellectual love of God], I can now begin to see birds and animals not as some background blur but as incredibly detailed machines .." that impulse is foreign to me. Why not reverse this and see machines as incredibly crude and clumsy surrogates for Nature, the ultimate mad inventor? Machines as botched animals? But if you call ILG by its proper name, "pantheism", then sure I’m down with the programme. For me though I'd rather identify the G bit with life/energy/animation as opposed to deadness/stillness/the inanimate.

>Under Milk Wood

been meaning to reread that for years! The record with Richard Burton reading it sounds better still from Mark's description

>And Dylan Thomas, the only Dylan whose words I have ever cared about.

Not even the third Dylan, Mr Showtime?