Images of our species’ capacity for depravity and cruelty are served to the screens on our desks and in our pockets. My daughter notices other things on her daily scoot to school along the back roads. The little bollard that flashes rhymically unless it detects sunlight, the opening in the row of conifers exposing an ominous hollow, the solitary roadside poppy, a cacophonous parliament of sparrows emanating invisibly from a hedge, the sprinkling of dew you receive on shaking a branch of a pine tree, a big brown leaf in a drive that she insisted was a small inert hedghog until closer inspection proved otherwise. Her fast-evolving mind a ferment of curiosities, recollections (the past is always ‘yesterday’), anticipations (the future always ‘tomorrow’), observations, and an impatience for Halloween.

Amidst this nosegay of noticings, chestnuts in their spiky husks, everywhere now, she stamps and gathers up the shiny harvests. She knows that they are edible because they have a little tassel. The beech husks, too, prickly on the outside, she knows they are soft and pillowy on the inside. Still closed, I stashed one of those in my pocket and left it on my desk, and by the end of an anxious workday it had opened up to reveal its downy interior, wide enough for your little finger.

‘Because each year of your life amounts to less of your life than the year before, the things in it change you less.’ From Stephanie Burt’s poem, Horse Chestnuts