‘There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.’
               — Francis Bacon, essay ‘On Beauty’


‘Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.’
               — William Shakespeare ‘Romeo and Juliet’


It is true that as time runs out (in truth, it is running out for all living things, but let us leave that thought aside) one’s perception of the most ordinary things, especially with sight, sound, smell and touch, is hugely enhanced. My life has been so busy, that the thought of me contemplating an orange pillow resting on a red chair, with the shadow of a venetian blind slanting across both, would have been almost absurd. And I say this as a poet who for years has done everything I could to increase my powers of observation and comprehension. Yet now, I could happily watch the sun shift its shadow across those ordinary objects for a great while. And why? Because it is unlikely I will ever see the same thing again. This is what made those last goodbyes at a railway stations as men went off to war such terrible events. Indeed, some wives refused to see off their husbands and asked them to slip out of the house quietly, not because they did not love them, but because the pain of a last indelible vision would be too much to bear. I had heard this from an old lady in my mother’s nursing home, but never properly understood it before. I do now.