Sitting in a pub garden for the first time in years. There’s a Japanese maple in the corner gone gold, its upstretched fingers all bloody red.

Depeche Mode playing over the pub loudspeakers and I’m scribbling in a notebook and looking at the sky. It could be the 1980s. With my phone put away and an analogue watch on my wrist, I can see nothing of 2024. Old bricks and a magpie picking bugs out of a mossy roof.