There were just the two of us in our kitchen. I looked. It was a photograph of a football crowd. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, pushing a stray lock of unruly red hair out of her eyes. ‘We could pick one person in the crowd, anyone at all. Take her for instance.’ She pointed her finger at a young woman’s round, smiling face. ‘She’s a person just like you and me. She thinks and feels and eats and sleeps and laughs and cries and… Everything about herself and her day-to-day living is as … er … as big to her as what our own lives are to us. It’s her world. Yet to us she’s nothing but a face in a crowd, just as we would be to her. And what I’ve just said could apply to any single one of the billions of people in the whole world.’ ‘Yes, I know what you mean,’ I said excitedly. Off we went into one of those delightful conversations in which we were cresting the same waves. And then we began thinking about ‘time’.
