Could you have my address please? Would you? Would you have my address? Please? I’d like to give you my address, I’d very much like to.

It’s an address, no more, do not be afraid or apprehensive; I’d very much appreciate if you’d have it, or anyone else, whoever else. Anyone else? For my address? I mean wanting to have my address because I am wanting to give it? Believe me... but that said, I do believe you too, and understand your hesitation. There are addresses and addresses. And there are addresses you may have cause to be genuinely alarmed with, such is their nature.

I do not mean postal addresses, I trust you’d have got that by now, although postal addresses too can inspire fear and foreboding and can be things to best draw clear of. But no, I am not offering you that sort of address, not, you know, some address that does not go on a calling card, an address that is a secret address, an address without an address, an address that folks go to or are taken to and never come back from ever and ever.

I have no such address and so I cannot offer it. What I had in mind, instead, is an address address, you know, an address that is made. Like at a gathering. Or an occasion. Or during a campaign of some sort, which we have become so used to. We have some sort of campaign or other going on all the time nowadays. It often makes me wonder what else may be going on other than this campaign or that campaign for this or that or the other, because it appears to me that very little other than some sort of campaign is going on in and around us and our lives, such as they are.

I digress and go this way and that, but that is not unusual. We are all that way in some way or other, going this way and that instead of going the way we ought to have been going. But whose is to decide which way and what ought? Anyway, dafaa karo. Where were we? Are we on our way this way? Or are we on our way that way? We are not where we wanted to be — or you wanted us to be, or so and so and so on and so forth wanted us to be — because we do not even know where we are. Which is why I wanted to give you my address in the first place, but nobody said, yes, please give us your address and so it is that instead of giving you a postal one, I have been trying to give you a political one.

When I begin to tell

There’s often no stopping me

So if there’s an alarm bell

Find it — and why — I shall tell thee.