It’s quite possibly just me, though, and all Elephants are necessarily early drafts for most of us, so it’s all swell!

Once he’d said that the how’s and why’s weren’t important and hinted at some responsibility for his position, I felt I had his permission to move on from worrying about the details. I’m glad you used the word ‘subtle’, I hadn’t known that was what I was trying for but I think it probably was. I also felt that, as you put it his ‘mental break with the world’ wasn’t something that could only be appreciated by the homeless as it’s something many of us experience from time to time, and it is an act of will that repairs it; the simplest and most difficult of all things.

As an aside, I had this uncertainty about whether Paul was Angel or Ordinary Man. I was going to have our narrator come back often looking for him but never see him again, but when I looked up the patron saint of birth and found him to be St Elmo/Erasmus – the patron also of journeys and sailors, it made sense to just shoehorn that in as the title and let it be. We don’t need to know who he is, and though he’s vital, it is our storyteller who must own his life and his rebirth.

A subtle look at homelessness, and at human kindness, and the things that make a difference to people.