In my movements from home to one place of work to another place of work to home I maintain a strict and instinctive adherence to the regularities of the clock. I leave home at 8.30 every morning. I am not looking at the clock. I just sense it. Like I sense that the alarm will ring at 7.30 and so wake up automatically at 7.29. I am like that, embedded in time. This means that I tend to come across other people who also obey the demands of the clock: children going to school; adults going to work. There is a particular pair of mother and child that I unfailingly pass on the curve of the Oval at about 8.34 every morning. This has been going on for a couple of years now. I know them well and they, or at least the mother, know me well, though we have never spoken, nor even exchanged other than a furtive glance. Certainly never acknowledged the other’s presence. But the periodicity of our superficial encounters has produced a strange, magical relationship. Magical in that it has sprung up from no active behaviour on our part. It is, I suppose, the same kind of almost erotic frisson that occurs when two people are stuck in a lift together. The imposed intimacy can often sent up a highly charged bond between the two, the sense of having experienced a moment that fate has ordained. I wonder if I will ever acknowledge that mother and child. If, in some future moment we are ever obliged to confront each other, to say hallo or good morning in a village fete or a town hall community meeting to discuss the saving of the local post office, it would be as if we are picking up a historical relationship with all its melancholy and regret.

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