‘So, basically, we’re fucked?’

‘Shafted!’

‘The Fat Lady’s singing?’

‘That’s not me; that’s the radio in the kitchen.’

‘The dinosaurs happily roamed the planet for a hundred and fifty million years with no more technology than nest building. They might still be here but for an unlucky meteorite strike. But we, Homo sapiens, are evolutionarily conditioned to wipe ourselves out after a mere ten thousand years of civilization because we have opposable thumbs?’

‘Yup. It’s a bummer, isn’t it? Evolution is exponential.’ Richard pushed back his chair and stood up excitedly to demonstrate. He flung his arms as wide apart as they would go. ‘Picture the whole history of life on earth on this scale. Each millimetre represents a million years. The two metres between my hands represents the two billion years that it took to advance from simple protoplasm to simple fish.’

Richard looked round the table, swaying slightly and waving his outstretched hands like a goalkeeper preparing for a penalty shoot-out. He locked eyes and nodded to each of us in turn to assure himself that we were all following his analogy until he reached David who had fallen asleep, slumped sideways in his chair. Richard glared at him, started to say something, and then thought better of it. He moved on to Becca who appeared, much more promisingly, to be waiting for Richard’s attention with eager anticipation. She fluttered her long eyelashes in a parody of puppy-like devotion. A lascivious grin crept onto Richard’s face, a grin which was dashed almost before it had started as Becca stuck out her long tongue and blew him a soggy raspberry.

Richard abandoned the circumspection of his audience, straightened up, clapped his hands together for attention and then held them out in front of him, now just twenty centimetres apart.

‘This distance represents the two hundred million years that it took to progress from simple fish to dinosaurs.’ He turned his body left and right so that we could all appreciate the much smaller distance now being demonstrated. Becca giggled suggestively when the eight-inch gap was proffered to her; Richard studiously ignored her. He tried, and failed, to slip his left hand into his dinner-jacket pocket, steadied himself by leaning forwards against the cherry wood tabletop and ploughed on.

‘On my Richard Davies scale of evolution, apes came down out of the trees just four millimetres ago.’ He held his right hand up to his eye, the thumb and forefinger so close together that he had to squint as he surveyed his audience through the gap. When he was convinced that we fully appreciated the tiny distance separating us from our arboreal ancestors he dramatically plucked one wavy brown hair from his beard, winced, and held it up triumphantly as Exhibit A.

‘Over the last two hundred thousand years Man has developed tool making capabilities. We have developed language. We have mastered fire.’ Richard was in full flow. He was almost shouting in his excitement. Becca put her hands up to ward off the flying spittle. ‘But… ’ Richard suddenly stopped. He dropped the hair onto his pudding plate and continued in a hushed tone. ‘But… it is only in the last ten thousand years that we have discovered agriculture, enabling us to move from itinerant hunter-gatherers to domiciled civilization. That’s the last one-hundredth of a millimetre in the two metres of the Richard Davies evolutionary scale.’

Richard scanned the remnants of the five-course meal, his eyes flitting desperately from the cheese board to the jug of celery and then on to the salt grinder.

‘I’m afraid that I don’t have anything small enough to demonstrate ten thousand years on the Richard Davies scale,’ he concluded sadly. He slumped back into his chair, deflated by the realisation that his whole presentation had ended in anti-climax through the want of a convenient microscope.

William Searle clapped sarcastically from the head of the table. ‘Thank you Richard. Very enlightening. Now pass the port.’

‘Bugger the port. Who’s got the dope?’

‘Yes, where is Angus? You said he was going to join us later.’

‘And is Anne coming with him?’

Why did I come?

I hadn’t met any of the people in the wood-panelled dining room for over ten years, but if I closed my eyes I could have been back at Cambridge University in the Robinson College refectory sitting with these same people discussing which lectures we had missed that day. We had been thrown together by the lottery of the college room-allocation system; as first year undergraduates we had been assigned neighbouring identical rabbit hutches to live in on one of the number of identical corridors in the college building. We had different backgrounds, we were reading different subjects, but the seeds of our friendship were sown on the very first evening as we waved good-bye to our chauffeuring parents and got viciously drunk together in the college bar.

We had held each other’s hands, both literally and metaphorically, through the chaos of freshers week. William and Hannah, as the only ex-Public School boarders amongst us, were our early leaders. They introduced us to the peculiar half-communal, half-independent lifestyle which is university life. I had never lived away from home before. I was worried that I would not know anybody, that I would be lonely, that I would not fit in, but my shyness was blown away by their hearty camaraderie. I must have shut the door to my room occasionally to study and sometimes to sleep, but for most of that first year Hannah enforced a strict open door policy down the corridor, which meant that there was always a coffee break or a cocktail party in progress in at least one room at any given time of the day or night. It was more like living in a commune than living alone. By day three, William had organised the first corridor party. Attendance was compulsory; no excuses. It became traditional for non-attendance at such events to be punished by "trial of the flooded carpet". A plastic dustbin was half filled with water and balanced precariously against the non-attendees door while they were inside. A Dispenser of Justice would then knock and warn the guilty party that Court was in session. Rubber-neckers in the corridor took bets on whether the victim would be agile enough to ease open their door and slip an arm though the crack to catch the bin before it crashed forward and emptied twenty gallons of water onto their study floor.

By day five, Hannah had asked William out; by day ten he had accepted.

Our group grew and changed during the three years of undergraduate life. We made other friends at tutor groups, at sports clubs, at extra-curricular societies. In the second year we moved out of the college residential accommodation and into our own digs. A few of the more peripheral members of our corridor clique drifted away, but the A-team managed to rent both halves of a semi-detached town house. In a truly depressing validation of gender stereotyping the girl’s half of the building remained an oasis of neatness for the whole year while the boy’s half slowly descended into a dwelling barely fit for human habitation. And it wasn’t just because we threw the better parties.

By year three the game of musical beds appeared to have run its course. Most of us had settled into stable relationships with partners either inside or outside the group. We moved in our pairs into a variety of flats around the city according to our various budgets, but we still mainly socialised as ‘The Group’. It had been friendship of such depth and quality that I had assumed it would last forever.

Why did I come?

I looked round at their faces ten years on. We had all aged physically, but during the canapés and aperitifs I had been surprised by the ease with which I was accepted back into their company. I had steeled myself for their pity but detected only genuine interest in their questions. There was a comfortable familiarity about their mannerisms and their speech patterns but as the meal progressed I picked up the subtle changes in their personalities. Their lives had moved on. As Cambridge undergraduates we had believed that we could achieve anything that we put our minds to; when I had last seen these people we were still bubbling with the optimism and confidence of that ambition. Now they had become established. They had served their apprenticeships in their chosen professions and, even as high-flyers, their lives had been straight-jacketed by the mundane limitations of their jobs. The conversation had turned to commuting, and mortgages, and comparing holiday entitlements. The group dynamic had orientated itself around the most financially successful members. Now as the quality and quantity of William’s wine cellar began to take its toll the old naive enthusiasm was returning.

‘But Richard, I don’t follow the steps of your argument from the exponential rate of evolution to the inevitability of human extinction,’ said William.

William Searle, our portly host, was successfully accumulating his fortune in the City. He had married Hannah, of course, as soon as he was properly established at his first Merchant Bank. For her part, Hannah hadn’t quite settled on any particular career before the arrival of the first of their three girls had provided her with a more suitable occupation. Richard Davies was now a lecturer in Environmental Policy and researching Sudden Man-made Environmental Disasters, or SMEDs as he called them. He had not married Jane, which was interesting. Instead, he had married Sarah, a ravishing Latin beauty who was demonstrably expecting their first baby. So poor old Jane had married someone called Simon Mabbutt. Simon was absent without explanation. Hannah had said stoutly "We don’t talk about Simon" when she over-heard me asking about him but I noticed that Jane was still wearing a wedding ring.

Why did I come?

These people were still each other’s best friends. Jane was Godmother to David’s son. William was providing free consultancy for Becca’s new venture, a financial advice web-site. Sarah had been round for tea with Hannah last week and gone home with a black bin-bag full of second-hand baby clothes. All of them were sitting comfortably in their black ties and evening gowns. All of them at ease, except me, Jim Turner, dispatch rider, in my denim shirt and black Levis. I had dropped out while they had moved on.

‘I can’t believe you lot. This is first year undergraduate stuff.’ Richard was becoming indignant. William was making the mistake of trying to engage in a serious debate, whereas Richard appeared to be only capable of repeating the same words in a slightly different order. ‘One hundred thousand years ago Homo Erectus had a cranial capacity of about a litre. Most of us round this table have brains half as big again.’ He paused and looked pointedly at Jane. ‘The rapidly changing environmental conditions during the ice ages favoured those species which had the capacity to co-operate, to organise, to communicate. Big brains were favoured over big teeth. The trend only stopped when baby’s heads became so big that they started killing their mothers at childbirth, but just as we reached that point our brain size reached the critical mass required to support the complexity of language. It is the key differentiator. The development of language lit the blue touch-paper which caused the explosion of Homo sapiens development, leaving all other species behind us in our dust. We think in language; we conceptualise in language. Suddenly we could theorize about the world around us. We could test those theories and learn from our mistakes. The benefits of instinct which had previously been ingrained over generations of successful mutations could now be achieved by an intelligent man in an afternoon of trial and error.’

‘Or by an intelligent woman in half-an-hour.’

Why did I come?

Five days ago I’d been sent to make a pick-up at the Gresham’s Investments building in Canary Warf. When I got there I had been summoned to the twelfth floor by a certain William Searle. It did occur to me as I stepped out of the lift into the plushly carpeted reception area that it would be an awkward coincidence if my pick-up turned out to be from the William Searle of my long distant Cambridge days. He was, but it wasn’t a coincidence and it was only slightly awkward. William had been as friendly as his obviously busy day had allowed and the pick-up turned out to be a gold embossed invitation for me to this ten-year reunion dinner. I had no idea how he found me; Jim Turners are two a penny. I was touched to be invited but initially non-committal. I wasn’t sure I wanted to rake up the past. It was only this morning that I had phoned Hannah and said that I would come.

‘I understand that bit,’ said Becca. It dawned on me rather belatedly that she and William were just winding Richard up. The dumber they played, the more exasperated Richard became. ‘Homo sapiens just happened to be the first species to develop language in a way which is qualitatively different from other animals. If the apes had got there first then we might all be starring in an ironic tribute to their supremacy called "Planet of the Humans". But why does it follow that because we can now blow ourselves up, we necessarily will?’

I was sitting between Becca and David. They were both in long-term relationships with women who, as outsiders, had understandably declined join the party. I had learnt that David’s partner, Carol, was in PR. David, with his 2:1 in Process Engineering, was now a full-time house-husband and in charge of the day-care of their two year-old son which, by his own admission, mainly entailed sitting on the couch with him and watching day-time TV. Becca claimed that she and her partner had made and then lost a paper million with an Internet start-up company during the dot.com glory days. They had developed a computer program which converted a simple web-camera into a motion-sensitive burglar alarm. When you registered with snatchwatch.com you could download the software so that while you were out your web-cam would detect any movement in the room and trigger your PC to automatically open up a connection to the Internet and transmit the pictures to the watching world. Subscribers to snatchwatch.com could log on and watch real-life burglaries in progress, not just in their own homes but in the homes of all the other subscribers. Burglaries and family pets which had got loose, and the sexual antics of the occasional exhibitionist who conveniently "forgot" that the cameras were on them. Becca’s partner, Ginny, was the techno-wizard; Becca was the one who wooed the City financers. She had become very self-assured. Her hair was now platinum blonde and she was wearing a figure-hugging evening gown which confirmed her regular gym sessions. I could imagine how the blue-suits had lapped up the idea of snatchwatch.com.

Why did I come?

I pushed my chair back against the wall and watched the impassioned, drunken debate going on all round me with a poignant nostalgia. Richard, pontificating as always; Becca, coarse and witty; William, solemn but articulate; Jane looking slightly bewildered but smiling defiantly. We could have been having exactly the same conversation ten years ago.

‘We are the end product of the evolutionary process,’ Richard continued patiently. ‘We have won the race. No other species can compete. We don’t even have to adapt to the environment; we adapt the environment to us. But ten thousand years of intellectual capabilities have been superimposed on two thousand million years of competitive instinct. One hundredth of a millimetre compared to two metres of evolutionary struggle. Survival of the fittest rewards selfishness. A locust population will explode until it has destroyed its entire food supply; then all except the strongest will starve. There is only the thinnest veneer of civilization separating us from the savage beast; a few thousand years against the eons of evolution. What hope is there that we can curb our innate selfishness now that we have the power to destroy the environment for our short term goals?’

‘A grand point, Richard, and well made’, said Angus McManus. We all turned to look at him. Nobody had noticed him arrive. Angus was leaning nonchalantly against the doorframe with his arms folded across his broad chest. The faint Scottish burr was still noticeable in his sardonic drawl. He was wearing a traditional city pin-stripe suit as if he had just come from his office. It was immaculately tailored. Angus had always given the impression of being much larger than his five feet ten inches. We had played rugby together for Robinson College. Angus was our scrum half. I, four inches taller than him, had played open-side flanker, but when we walked into a pub together it had always been Angus who had turned heads and hushed conversations with his roguish self-confident swagger.

‘Hannah, darling. I’m so sorry we’re late. Business dinner with the Colonel; three line whip, I’m afraid. Anne is just parking the… Fuck me. James Fucking Turner.’

‘Hello, Angus’. I said quietly. I had drawn back from the table and Angus had evidently not noticed me at first; now he came pushing behind the other chairs and I just had time to stand up before he enveloped me in a smothering embrace.

‘James Fucking Turner! How the fuck are you?’

‘I’m good, Angus, good. But I’m not going to bore the others with my life story all over again. You should have been here earlier.’ We looked at each other and our eyes were still locked when the door-bell sounded.

‘That will be Anne I suppose. Let us retire for coffee,’ said William, and then he added in a puzzled tone ‘How did you get in, Angus?’

‘Ways and means, dear boy. Ways and means,’ Angus replied enigmatically.

While William and Hannah went into the hall to welcome Anne, Angus took it upon himself to usher the rest of the party before him down the corridor towards the drawing room. Somehow he contrived to greet all the other guests by name during the short walk while still keeping his left hand on my shoulder. He was wearing gold cuff-links, his aftershave was fresh and light, and with every step I was internally repeating the mantra: "Why did I come? Why did I come? Why did I come?" Then I heard Anne’s voice behind me saying, ‘James. Is it really you?’

I had been anticipating this moment for five days while pretending to convince myself that it would be no big deal. Now that the moment had arrived I desperately wished that it hadn’t. Ten years since I had last seen Anne; since I had last kissed her. Ten years of deliberately suppressed thoughts and slowly ebbing emotions shot straight back to the surface as if she had left me only yesterday. I asked myself one last time: ‘Why did I come?’, shrugged Angus’s hand from my shoulder, and turned. I knew the answer.

Anne had stopped at the far end of the corridor, framed by the doorway and back-lit by the brighter light from the hall. She ran both her hands through her hair, scraping her strawberry-blonde mane back from her forehead. It looked like a deliberately rehearsed gesture but I knew it as a nervous mannerism, executed with the exact level of distractedness as in all my memories. She started towards me and I was struck by her poise. She was wearing a plain white blouse tucked into tightly-belted jeans. I had forgotten how erect she held her self. She had always been supremely comfortable about her own body. I once joked that she held her shoulders back provocatively, challenging the world not to stare at her breasts. She had been surprised and hurt by the implications of my suggestion. The truth was that at the age of twenty Anne had known that she was labelled "beautiful" - how could she not? - but she had found her own way of dealing with this millstone by making no allowance for it what-so-ever. She did not dress down and slouch apologetically, but neither did she wear the glamour-model clothes or vogue fashion haute couture that she could undoubtedly have carried off. She never flirted, but she had learnt that even her old friends could misinterpret her interested-but-innocent conversation as such - because she was beautiful. She never held this against them and she didn’t stop having interested-but-innocent conversations either. She had just learned to live with it.

Anne took a step forward and the light in the corridor lit-up her broad, tanned face; the high cheekbones; the full, smiling lips and her startlingly blue, laughing eyes.

‘James. You came. I’m so glad. When William suggested a reunion, no one thought that you would come. But I knew that you would.’

I couldn’t speak. Her voice was slightly deeper and huskier than it had been but her clipped Northern Irish vowels still broke through the newly acquired Received Pronunciation. She came skipping down the corridor and I actually braced myself for her to throw herself into my arms. She didn’t, of course. She just took my hands in hers and squeezed them tightly before reaching up on tip-toe to kiss me lightly on both cheeks. Her breasts brushed against my chest.

I breathed in. She was wearing a sweet, subtle perfume; not the sandalwood which still evoked her so strongly that I sometimes caught myself closing my eyes and inhaling the scent from complete strangers in the street. But her smile was the same. Her eyes had a few more laughter lines in their corners but they held mine with a familiar intensity as ten years of unspoken questions passed between us.

‘I take it that you two know each other then?’ Angus asked sarcastically to break the lengthening silence. He completed the mock introduction: ‘James, this is my wife, Anne McManus, lawyer and human rights expert. Anne, meet James Turner. Jim, I hear, rides motorbikes for a living.’

I dropped Anne’s hands. I swallowed and ran my tongue over my lips to try to unglue my mouth. I knew that Anne would notice; she used to be able to mimic mannerism which I didn’t even know I had. Her smile deepened and she tilted her head slightly to one side, a gesture which I knew meant "I’m waiting". She was enjoying this. I became aware that the longer it took me to say something the more significant the utterance would have to be. I was terrified of saying something corny.

‘Anne, you are more beautiful than ever.’

‘Thank you, James. And you are obviously still looking after yourself,’ Anne replied easily. Her tone was lightly mocking and I realised that she was referring to the vestiges of purple bruising under my left eye.

‘I am playing rugby again,’ I explained. ‘Just semi-professional stuff; for Rosslyn Park. But we had the BBC cameras down last week.’ I was beginning to function.

‘Excellent,’ said Angus. ‘Now, why don’t we all join the others in the drawing room?’

William and Hannah had bought this Hampstead town house a year ago but Hannah had supervised its entire refurbishment before allowing them to move in last month. The dining room had been all dark wood panelling and subdued lighting; the drawing room was bright and spacious with a massive modern mirror over the mantelpiece. I felt like I was stepping out onto a stage as we entered the room. Sarah and David were sitting together, talking babies. Jane and Becca were giggling over William’s CD collection, having discovered Abba Gold hidden between Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky. The others had made a bee-line for William’s drinks cabinet. All their faces turned to us expectantly as we entered.

‘Angus, Jim and Anne: the Holy Trinity,’ said David. ‘It’s just like old times.’

But it wasn’t, and it never would be again.

William came in and supervised the liqueurs. I refused a whisky, just as I had previously refused the gin, the Chablis, the Rioja, the port and the brandy. More than ever I needed the comfort of knowing that at any time I could just grab my crash-helmet and leave.

Later, when we had all settled into a circle of sorts, Angus rolled up a joint and passed it round.

‘You are wrong, Richard, about natural selection’, he said. It was typical of Angus to pick up on someone else’s specialist subject. He had always loved playing devil’s advocate. You could never tell what he really thought; he just loved a good debate. ‘Darwin didn’t say that it was the selfish which survive. He said it is the fittest, the best. We need to stop doing ourselves down as a species and start applauding our own achievements. Our ability to adapt the environment to our own convenience is something to be proud of. Unless you want to go back to living in an ice-cave, wearing rotting animal skins, and having a life expectancy of twenty five.’

‘So you don’t believe in global warming then?’ Sarah asked, shocked by the apparent heresy.

‘I accept that average temperatures are going up. There are records going back hundreds of years to prove it. Ninety-eight percent of the world’s scientists can’t all have misread their thermometers. I also accept that the rising temperatures are probably the result of human actions. I wouldn’t normally be so confident that a consensus of ninety-eight percent of the world’s scientists meant that they had necessarily come up with the right hypothesis, but in this particular case it’s pretty obvious. In the space of a few years we have released all the carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere which it had previously taken hundreds of millions of years to capture underground as oil and coal deposits. There has got to be a price to pay for a change of that scale. Scientific theory predicts that the impact of such a change would be an increase in global temperatures and - what do you know? - there is empirical evidence that global temperatures are rising. It would be rather churlish not to accept that the boffins have got the cause and effect right this time.’

‘Then how can you be so sanguine about it?’ Sarah asked angrily, caressing her bump as if to protect her unborn child from this dangerous talk.

‘Do you know how much of the chemical potential energy is actually turned into power for every litre of petrol sold at the pumps?’ Angus asked. ‘Five percent. The other ninety-five percent is spent on geological surveys, extraction, refinement, distribution and the current inefficiencies of the internal combustion engine. Five percent. Even if we only increase that to ten percent it would still be the same as halving our carbon emissions at a stroke. Have a bit more pride in your species. Survival of the fittest, remember.’

‘We may be alright in the West,’ Sarah persisted, ‘but in the third world hundreds of millions of people will die prematurely because of climate change.’

‘And we need to do more to help them through the transition from an oil based economy. Of course we do. But it is intellectually lazy just to jump on the doom-and-gloom bandwagon. The lives of most of the people in the world are better now than they have ever been in human history. Historically we will look back on the twenty first century not as the century which unleashed global warming but as the century which stopped squandering the one-off bonanza of cheap energy, burning up millions of years worth of oil in a few generations just to give us cheap flights to the Costa Brava. We need to start preparing for when the oil runs out. Carbon emissions will stop then for sure. It is entirely legitimate to use up a finite resource but only if it is a deliberate pump-priming exercise which moves us on to a better sustainable technology. That’s our real challenge.’

‘It’s not just environmental issues we’ve got to worry about,’ said Anne. She was sitting on the floor and leaning back against Angus’s legs but her statement was directed at Richard. ‘Your contention is that we are the first species to effectively make ourselves immune from evolutionary pressures because we can now change the environment to fit our needs instead of the other way round. But because we are still shackled by pre self-consciousness survival instincts we care more about having a warm house today than a frazzled planet tomorrow, so it’s inevitable that we’re going to fuck up the world. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?’

‘Did I say that?’ Richard asked, taking a drag on the communal joint. ‘Cool. It sounds pretty convincing to me.’

‘We may trash the planet in the end but those same selfish, short-term tendencies will screw up our civilisation long before we screw up the planet. People say that "History is dead" because liberal democracy and a regulated free market have won the battle between competing political and economic systems. Soon we will all be living like Denmark. Try telling that to the autocracies in Russia and China, to the Islamic fundamentalists, to the starving millions in India. Do any of us really stop to wonder why four fifths of the world’s wealth is in the hands of one fifth of its population? It is not inherently ours, we don’t deserve it, unless you are some sort of white supremacist. And it is not because our countries have greater natural resources. Far from it. It is the legacy of colonialism, and our systems of government and multinational corporations which perpetuate the inequality.’

‘I apologies for my wife,’ Angus said formally to the assembled company. ‘She does like to bring her work home from the office with her. Of course, my dear, we might be successful precisely because we have implemented the liberal democracy and regulated free market which you distain so much.’

Anne smiled sheepishly.

‘No, Anne’s right.’ Jane said stoutly. She had been lying on the floor in the middle of the circle, apparently asleep. Now she struggled up into a sitting position and we all waited expectantly for her to continue.

‘Well...she just is,’ Jane said lamely, and slumped back onto the floor.

‘Thank you for that vote of confidence,’ Anne said, but she continued in a more measured tone. ‘Every civilisation since the Indus Valley has fallen at its apparent peak, toppled by barbarian hordes who didn’t understand that they were expected to conform to the same laws of behaviour as their supposed superiors. Democracy may be the best system of government that we have yet come up with, but it isn’t perfect by a long shot. The five year democratic cycle is fundamentally incapable of redistributing wealth on the scale required to buy off global terrorism on a catastrophic scale. It’s down to short-term individual selfishness again. People don’t vote for jam tomorrow, they vote for jam today. They don’t vote for jam for others, they vote for more jam for themselves.’

‘Doomed. We are all doomed,’ said David in a mock-tragic voice.

‘Nation state democracy cannot work in a truly globalised economy.’ Sarah said, picking up Anne’s theme. ‘Soon we will all be fighting each other over fresh water.’

‘So we need a world government to arbitrate?’ Angus asked sceptically. ‘I can’t see that happening in our life time, but who knows? That’s just my point: our political and economic systems are evolving to meet the crisis. Look at the European Union. It is anathema to our parent’s generation but our children will take it for granted. It’s not the finished article - whatever happened to subsidiarity? And some element of proportional representation is inevitable to keep people engaged in the democratic process - but as you requested, the nation state is evolving before our very eyes to meet the challenges of a global economy. The change might not seem dramatic because it doesn’t entail twenty million people dying in the trenches to achieve it, but these are exciting times. Your problem is that you compare the world with how you would like it to be, not with how it has been. Life has always been pretty grim for most people. It still is, but it is getting better, not worse. There are millions of people starving in India but there are four billion more people in the world right now who are not starving than there were a hundred years ago. Isn’t that something to be proud of?’

‘What do you think, James?’ Anne asked suddenly, looking at me.

‘I don’t know, Anne,’ I said. ‘As you may have gathered, I do not walk in the rarefied circles of political policy making. Most of this discussion has gone straight over my head.’

Anne held my eye, forcing me to commit myself.

‘It may not be original,’ I continued reluctantly, ‘but my own view is that we all have opportunities to make a difference: to challenge the racist joker, to tolerate the drunken tramp, to recycle our newspapers. We all know deep down what is right. In our own small ways we can all choose to do it. Or not. To add our light to the sum of light.’