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Here is the St Catherine poem. Best wishes Matthew St Catherine and the Philosophers This is a painting with five books in it. The young woman stands with her back to the philosophers who have their backs to the window. They are reading, ignoring the passers-by who are reading them. Behind them all we can see the rest of the palace, a harbour, a mountain, the landscape going blue. The first book is a guide to Purgatory, the spiral mountain. The only escape is up, but you have to know the way. This book will tell you. It takes three men to read it, and first of all you need the guide to the book. It’s in your hand, uncrumple it. Or you could just turn round and see if you can untwist the rocks themselves. The second is the book of Good and Evil. If you read two pages at once you get the world exactly as it is. The red and black figures twitch into life as you flicker through them. The third book was originally a baby but a sorceress appeared at his christening and turned his skin to leather and his cries to hieroglyphs. No one has told the priest, or else he blesses it anyway, not knowing what happens when it grows up, in Chapter 20. The fourth book is so real that Catherine holds it in an insulating cloth. It gives the low-down on the philosophers, how without looking they can tell everything about the world except what she is doing there. She knows. The fifth is the perfect book. It is written in a language only it can understand, but it’s bored with reading itself. It lies around yawning all day, leaving itself undone. The king and the man he talks to have given up books. There is so much else for them to do, hill walking, crowd control, sailing, palace architecture. The king explains that he has hired a sculptor to describe the future in a marble frieze above their heads. No one has read it yet, and even Catherine doesn’t know that the wheel in that little panel up there has her name on it. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%