I often return to an odd little sentence in Robert Walser's microscripts, a thought captured that he then jotted down on a scrap of paper sometime before 1956: 'The failure to prize the chance to spend time in a cosmopolitan city highly enough to refrain from giving it up in favour of an upstart one-horse town.' Cosmopolitanism, seen today, is increasingly a crowded nightmare pre-occupied with advertising space and competitive visibility. The provinces are no longer the extremities, rather they provide lines of flight from the hellscape of the contemporary world for those privileged enough to take the time.