And what's fascinating in The Ten Thousand Things is that although there's time, an inexorable time of the three generations of lives, actively present, but place is the time, time doesn't really have to do with simply the human experience of it.

The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.

He lives out in Orchard Park. I mean, to be able to sit on the bench so patiently, for whatever part, and to be able to get up and do something, with such heroic competencies would be great.

It's as though all the terms of a family were present at one time rather than his dad and his mum. Not just a present authority, but the resident memory of what qualifies what else is the case.