Visiting a friend on Tuesday night, we were in maudlin mood. A young man he had known from childhood had thrown himself off a railway bridge, another death to add to our community’s terrible suicide rate.

We pondered times past, happy ones as well as sad, and somehow he got around to telling the story of the night the first child of another friend was born. He and the friend had sat on the green, drinking bottles of wine and singing Beatles songs until four in the morning, being joined …

Time is strange.

Turning the pages of a dairy or turning over the sheets of a calendar, it all seems equal, but when you look back on it, there are definitely chunks of time that lasted much longer than others.

It is not just how long it lasts, either, it’s the order it came in. There are sections that were in the distant past that are fresh and clear and other bits much more recent that have become old and faded.

I once heard it suggested that all of time …