‘I am a loose-strung fiddle, but she’ll know the head of me.’ ‘How long is it since you saw her?’ ‘In the flesh? Near enough fifty years.’ I nearly laughed. ‘But in every other way, some time every day since.’ And that stopped me. That was one of the things about him. He walked this line between the comic and the poignant, between the certainly doomed and the hopelessly hopeful. In time I came to think it the common ground of all humanity.
