Two framed photographs on the windowsill beside the bed.

One is of Uncle George, standing beside his motor-bike, somewhere in the Lake District, at a guess. He’s much younger than I remember him, of course, a young man back then, but I do recognise that it is him. No doubt about it.

Yet it’s wrong: it has to be. It just doesn’t make sense…

I mean, look at it! Look at the motor-bike; look at the guy he’s talking to, how he’s dressed? Okay, if you don’t know your history of motor-bikes, or you don’t know fashions in men’s clothing, fair enough, you might miss it. But if you do know either of those, you’d see straight away that that photo would have to have been taken just before the Great War.

That’s over a hundred years ago. And he was a full-grown young man in the photo – around twenty, maybe. Which means he would have been something like a hundred and twenty years old when he died.

But that’s not possible; that’s just not possible. Can’t be…