I'd been to Paris a fair amount in the past.....I liked the art galleries, the Metro with its enchanting station names, the islands in the river and the cathedral with its flying buttresses. It was a very handsome city, more so than London; but there was the smugness to deal with, the speech of grunts and shrugs, the barely concealed affection for the departed Nazi occupier; its void August, lay religiosity and fixation with appearances; the way people listened to and admired themselves in the act of talking; the surliness of its waiters, ticket sellers and shop assistants; the boiling little hotel rooms with their floral wallpaper; its willed ignorance of other cultures.

One thing of value my mother's eyes had known was my father's face; and as I gazed into them I half hoped to see - as one can sometimes catch the lights of a window reflected in another's iris - a small image of him smiling back at me. But there was of course no such thing, merely a mother's glaucous good will. Her eyes had seem me as an infant and a child; when she died she would take with her all that I had been in those years before my mind was formed: the wicker basket at the bedside, my head limp against her chest in sleep; the first words, learning how to walk, the bleeding knees, the schoolroom door, the emergence of something like a personality from the falls and tantrums and striving - all those sensations ad events which to her were daily trials but which for me were defining and all-but holy...all these would now be lost in the abyss of time.

As everyone of more than forty-five knows, older people don't think of themselves as such; they stayed locked at twenty-nine or thirty-three or some such sprightly age and view the grey hairs and flesh loosening on the bones as an aberration that a quick diet or a softer light will fix.

There are no atheists in a slit trench