To have waved out through the shop window when it was evident that no-one stood on the pavement outside would have caused the owner to have become concerned at the behaviour of this odd customer; attempting to explain the significance of the window was probably sufficiently unsettling in itself.

“This was Mounter’s television shop. When I was seven, the first coloured televisions I ever saw were through this shop window. I stood on the pavement there and just stared in at the pictures. I don’t remember what was on, it didn’t matter, it was just amazing to see coloured television.”

“The programmes were probably better,” laughed the woman.

“There were only three channels – and BBC 2 had only just started. There weren’t many repeats, it was all new. I can’t have stood out there for very long; it wouldn’t have been allowed.”

Why the desire to wave out the window? Why a wish to communicate with a a seven year old child standing on the street of a small country town fifty years ago?”

A decade or more ago, annual holidays in France would include standing on the quayside at Capbreton and waving across the river to the shore at Hossegor; the following year, it was important to stand on the shore at Hossegor and wave back. Passers by must have wondered at such odd behaviour, probably passing it off with a Gallic shrug and a muttered comment about “les rosbifs.”

In the mind of someone who would wish to communicate with himself fifty years ago, it was about trying to root an understanding of Einstein in the reality of a mundane life. Einstein believed space and time to be a continuum; time was as complete as space, “For us physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion,” he asserted.

If the distinction between myself at the age of seven and myself now is only an illusion, then would it have been illogical to have waved through the shop window? Would it have been just rosbif eccentricity to have waved across the river from Capbreton to Hossegor?

If Einstein was correct, if past, present and future are all rolled into one, then experiences of déjà vu cited as evidence of former lives are nothing of the sort: one has simply been aware of times simultaneously, which is logical, if the distinction between them is an illusion. Similarly, if Einstein was correct, then there can be no such thing as ghosts, claimed sightings being merely a sense of people in their own time.

Had the lady in the shop been aware that looking through the window might have been a springboard for such speculation, she would have been relieved I had not lingered longer.