I remember taking this picture of you, twenty years ago. We were told to clean up his flat, to make sure that nobody could find anything there that shouldn’t be found. You went around inspecting his books and his papers, and I took photographs so we could remember what was there and where we found it.

You were studying the chess pieces and that look came over your face — that intense, blue-flame concentration of yours — and I realised at that very moment that I had somehow carelessly given you something that I couldn’t take back, and that you didn’t even know that you had it.

And I wanted to capture that moment: to remember your face when I finally catalogued all the little things we documented, the postcards and the pill bottles and the scattered debris of his life.

I wanted to remember that in that room, in that silence, in the joyless, unbeautiful wreckage of that closed-in world, I had seen something sublime: something that could not be repeated in a thousand generations.

And I said, "Peter. Look here.”


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the less you know about me, the better. here you'll find mostly reblogs of BBC Sherlock- and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy-related things. the snark and the rabid fangirling come free. if not your cup of tea, feel free to find your bliss elsewhere.