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It felt good to be out in the world again, to be pushed about by the blustery wind. It felt good to be an anonymous small cog amongst the countless streetlamps, headlights, cars, passers-by, buildings, roads and noises of the city at nighttime. It felt good not to be talking to anyone, not to be thinking at all.

Is the world you live in every day made more from rocks and grass and trees, or from articles, certificates, records, files and letters?

I pushed Sophie’s question away, focusing my attention on things – on the hundreds of things made of matter, of chemical elements, of sound waves and light waves, standing or driving or strolling or rolling on all around me. Gloriously, none of it – in this city of millions of lives, and bricks, and lights – none of it had the slightest interest in me. None of it depended on my thoughts or ideas. The buildings and the traffic couldn’t care less if I replied to Andrew Black, or finished my Captain Scarlett script, or got a call from Imogen, or if there was a crossed line that sounded like my dead father talking nonsense from the answerphone. It didn’t matter. In the big, magnificent, busy scheme of things – it didn’t matter at all. I closed my eyes, felt the cold wind on my face and smiled deeply into the depths of my collar.