Cover photo for a reprint of my short story The Panama Hat (Falcon Editions 2008, originally published in The London Magazine August/September 1993).  Photographed in my office in Woking, England, on a summer’s afternoon in 2008.

‘For years now, I have been carrying around inside me a crazy old man in a panama hat. This is not in itself unusual. Many of us have other people inside ourselves. What is unusual is that my particular madman should always appear to me in a panama hat. It is large, and stained with sweat, and frayed around the brim: rammed squarely onto its wearer’s head, it plunges his face into permanent noontide shadow, so that all one can discern of his features is a crooked, perhaps broken nose, a prominent and unusually mobile jaw, and the occasional unforgettable gleam of lost and angry eyes. One can fill in the picture with reptilian folds of scraggy, suntanned skin, a greasy growth of salt-and-pepper stubble, and as many warts as one pleases; but these details are not in themselves important. What you see when you look at him (what I see when I look at him) is a deeply frightened and deeply frightening man …’

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