She always supposed thereafter that there was something special about that particular street corner. But such things as happened that day are outside of our usual experience, and the clustered cars and scattered shoppers served only as a backdrop.

This backdrop has that peculiar quality of a painting on the surreal side of impressionism – colours and forms dancing around in a way that is immensely suggestive of a meaning just out of reach, just inches behind the canvas.

I don’t know if the sunset had anything do to with it either, but there was one, and it was painting the unrelenting forms of the houses on Grove Street with a cheeky pink glow, of which it did not appear they entirely approved. Grove Street met with The Spinney on a corner that was usually busy, and sometimes chaotic, and this corner formed that moment in her walk home from work when she seemed to pass from the toil of the day and enter that resigned and relaxed state of being with which she entered her house. That was on a good day – when things were not so sanguine she would invariably be assailed by all sorts of clamouring thoughts as she strolled onto The Spinney, and it often took her until she’d passed the Fox and Raven to beat these intruders into submission.

For there were expectations, responsibilities to be carried, and there would be messages to be listened to – demands to be met – when she got back. She had long got to the stage where she held out no hope that the assorted post on the mat would hold anything that would cause her to smile, indeed, her friends, as she supposed, were even now saying that she doesn’t smile as often as she used to, you know…

But that was not to be today. For, even as she turned onto that corner, she was aware of an almost imperceptible stillness behind the sights of her familiar streets. Almost as if the very landscape had drawn its breath – an expectancy seemed to have fallen all around.

And as her feet fell, one after the other and again, the world seemed to halt, just for a second, and there was a blur, and a sound, (she almost wondered afterwards if she felt a brush on her cheek, like a breath of wind or the touch of a garment) and then the world started to spin once more.

And everything was immediately familiar again – and yet nothing was the same. And it never would be again. As she resumed her walk and looked up at the trees in the distance she felt an exultancy rise within her, and she wanted to sing, and she felt like she might be singing already, and she felt like she wanted to go on holiday and maybe to dance and perhaps to speak to her parents. There was a tingling on her skin, like the electric sensation she got once when climbing a hill before a storm, and above all she felt that as she walked, the landscape all around her wanted to give an enormous shout, and she was part of it, or even the reason for it….