The wind, increasing in strength the higher I go, whips up dust, whisks round dark interior corners or, in some of the more sheltered spaces, pushes the sedentary air up spiral staircases, preventing it brooding on the past, perhaps. A black cat goes by at the far side of the stage, flattened against the back wall, monitoring my movement. Unlike those in Scottish castles, the ghosts of the playboys and good time girls, happy families, bribe-taking officials, well-off party bigwigs and potential lovers wandering the desolate spaces here have no historical substance, they are Schrödinger ghosts, products of my thought experiment, ghosts of a never-to-happen future. Somehow the idea and the monochrome surroundings put me in mind of a room by Chen Zhen in which there are various everyday objects from newspapers to a bicycle. The whole room is ‘painted’ in red earth. The artist says that, unlike the people who excavate the past he imagines a room as it might be if it was excavated in the future.

At night we answer our mails and research at the internet café—which is full of game players—and then wander around in the night time carnival atmosphere of loud music, an impossible density of restaurants and fairground attractions for kids and grown ups.

L goes off and I find her again filming ‘all the fun of the fair’ along with the eddies of quiet where street artists draw their sitters and the zones of plaintive instrumental folk or Roma music — that seems to go almost unheard judging from the number of coins in the collection boxes. Being stationary for four consecutive nights has helped us to catch our breath, given us time to get caught up in the details and carried along in the flow of beach town activity. Later, sitting on the beach talking, we watch a whole family go for a midnight swim, jumping around in the waves, splashing and shouting. The father stands in the shadows cast by a small light attached to the camera’s hot shoe and in the shallows with rolled up trousers. He films everything until battery gives out and darkness returns. A natural fade out. We don’t have a camera with us unfortunately. L remembers an occasion when there was an electrical blackout in Vienna when she was close to St. Stephan’s Cathedral. She stopped to get used to the lack of light. Suddenly there was a flash and for a split second she saw a family posed in front of the cathedral’s main door.