I wrote this poem while staying on the coast of Croatia. I had travelled to Berlin to write the spoken word 'libretto' for Clare Dyson's dance work, Being There, and I was presenting at two conferences in England before returning home. I hadn't written the presentations, and had booked myself into a pension to prepare them.

The tourist season had ended, and I was the only guest for most of my stay. I was worried about my mother, who I'd left in residential care in Australia. I'd been caring for her for several years and she had been moved the night before I left to a nursing wing after attempts to rehabilitate her after a fall and a broken hip failed.

To complicate matters, in Croatia at that time, ten years after the war, very few businesses took credit card payments. I had arrived with no cash, naively expecting my credit card to be acceptable. I had applied for a second card with a cash withdrawal facility before leaving Australia but it hadn't arrived. It followed me through my overland journey from Berlin to the village via Paris, Florence, Rome, Venice and Lubjana and Split, but it had yet to catch up to me.

Every day at the pension the proprietors offered me food and a beach seat, but, terrified the card would fail to arrive and I'd be forced to pay off my accommodation charges with hard labour. So instead I walked ever day to the next village, which was larger and had a state-run supermarket that accepted credit cards, hoping fervently my cash card would arrive.

'The Village' expresses the combination of anxiety, grief, alienation, hope and fraught tedium of that time, and the larger problem of being a flawed, mortal human.