The Second Visit: Blood and Life
Night of 21 October 2026 — Customs House, 39 Quayside, Newcastle
If the blood that breeds in longing descends from Adam and Eve, it is no longer blood — it is life.
It was night. This time I was alone, and there was no rain. I stood beneath the same door: the crowned lion, the unicorn, the shield between them. Five nights earlier Mehmet and I had sat here; as he spoke, two rainbows had appeared over the Tyne. I published what I saw that evening, and assumed the place had said all it meant to say.
Tonight I understood: it had not. It had only pointed.
On the blue band beneath the coat of arms, the same four words: DIEV ET MON DROIT. God and my right. Last time I had lingered on the king’s “my”: for a servant, I wrote, all right belongs to the Righteous. That was true, but incomplete. It left a question open: what, then, is the right of the servant?
Tonight the answer came as a single sentence, and it leaned against the stone above my head. The blood that breeds in longing — humanity at its most frail, most earthly — carries the generations. But if that blood descends from the first two human beings, then what flows is not merely blood. It is life. And life is inviolable.
Beneath the stone tonight, I remembered these words from the Qur’an, the Torah and the New Testament:
“Fear your Lord, who created you from a single soul, and from it created its mate, and from the two spread countless men and women.” — Qur’an 4:1
“The life of the flesh is in the blood.” — Leviticus 17:11
“He made from one blood every nation of mankind.” — Acts 17:26
These words led me to reflect on our shared human origin and the inviolability of life. I asked myself: if the blood is one, then “my right” cannot belong to one — not to the crown, not to the strong, not to the many. It belongs to all of us. And perhaps that is what justice is: the fact of one blood, written into law. Those four words could stand above any door, not only a customs house.
In the first piece I wrote: I cannot prove this, nor do I need to. So it is tonight — with one difference. That evening the sky spoke; tonight the stone. At the first visit, it was shown; at the second, it was understood. Perhaps there is no third. Or perhaps every search for one’s rights is another walk past that door.
These lines, too, are written in the same poverty and helplessness. The first night was the seal; the second, the reading of it.