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Dear Mark , Your letter arrived with Tuesday's post , damp at the corners from the carrier's bag . I read it twice beside the woodstove while the wind drove sleet across the fells , and each sentence carried that restless , hurried cadence I remember from our shared flat in Bloomsbury . You write that the directorship at the Mayfair gallery has become an ornate cage , and you ask , with characteristic bluntness , whether my retreat to this limestone valley was an act of courage or mere cowardice . Had you asked me five years ago , I might have offered an elaborate philosophical defence . Today , I can only tell you what the silence here has taught me . Little did either of us comprehend , when we toasted our futures in that damp pub off Tottenham Court Road , how swiftly youth's infinite possibilities narrow into irrevocable facts . You chose the metropolitan arena , with its private views , board politics , and relentless velocity ; I , the draughty farmhouse and the slower discipline of print . To pretend that I never second - guess that fork in the road would be disingenuous . When the winter damp penetrates the stone walls and weeks pass without conversation deeper than sheep prices with the postman , phantom lives crowd the margins of my desk . I picture the catalogue launches you describe , the witty dinner debates , the intoxicating illusion that one sits at the cultural centre of gravity . Yet what you are mourning in your letter is not a mistaken decision , but the inevitable grief of selection itself . Every committed life requires the execution of its alternatives . In accepting the directorship , you did not merely choose a post ; you forfeited the quiet mornings you now romanticise from afar . Had you declined the offer and moved to the country , you would surely be pacing a flagstone kitchen right now , cursing the isolation and longing for the roar of London taxis . We are both haunted by the ghosts of what we declined to become . You wonder if you ought to resign before the autumn auction season . Perhaps you will , though I suspect you will not ; you are too deeply fascinated by the machinery of the art market to step away so cheaply . But if the noise in London threatens to drown out your own voice , remember that the door here remains unbolted , the kettle is perpetually on the hob , and the fells have survived far heavier burdens than our indecision . Yours as ever , Julian
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