He was waiting for me round a corner at the AGO's big Picasso show last spring. When I wrote about that unexpected afternoon in the Gehry-renewed gallery last June, I mentioned him only briefly. Don't know why. I have often thought of him since, the way a melody playing in the background while shopping, stows away in your brain for the rest of the day. His playfulness was what first enchanted me. He emerged just after the horrors of Guernica, and Dora Maar's own photographs of that masterpiece growing in slow painful panels across a studio wall. He made me laugh suddenly, his bulging sides, his strange elf-feet udder, his lopsided ears and those enormous paws. There wasn't a part of him I didn't cling to somehow, internally, in respite. He stood there reminding me that wars end, history marches wearily on, and goats will always be there.
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