Don’t go thinking of me as some nice little old lady, just before we get started properly. I’m not some scone-cheeked nana with a hearing aid and bunions the size of radishes. I’m not syrupy. Not in that sugary way that Felicity’s got. I’m not all toffees and crayons and TCP and I don’t buy my shoes at the pharmacy. These loafers are Italian, if you’re asking. Hand-stitched, though that seems an odd thing to brag about. Foot-stitched would be a sight worth seeing, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, they say I’ve still got that look about me – that glare that can cause a butterfly to burst into flames if it gets caught between me and whoever’s tried my patience. Eighty bloody years old, though. I swear I was twenty-five a fortnight ago.

Birthday coming up, more’s the pity. I’ve warned them all that I don’t want a fuss. Anybody who asks me to blow out eighty candles is getting written out of the will. I’m not one of those wheezy old buggers who sound like they’ve got a popcorn kernel stuck in their windpipe, but the last time I tried to blow up an armband for my granddaughter I ended up looking at the world through fireworks and polka dots and went to bed with a migraine. I swear, another couple of years and I’ll need a push just to get my rocking chair going.

What I’m saying is that I don’t want you thinking of me now when you think of me then. The Cordelia in the graveyard in ’82, I mean. She’d still be in her prime. She wouldn’t thank me for spoiling the picture of what she worked so hard to put out into the world. Keeping an image of me in your head will only spoil it. To be honest if you were to look at her, and at me, you wouldn’t think we were anything to do with one another. That was the general idea, of course. No point working in the security services if you can’t make yourself into somebody else. I was good at it. Still am. Got so far into my alternatives that sometimes it was hard to come back. And in the winter of ’82 I didn’t know who the bloody hell I was. You know where you put a straw into your gin and tonic and it breaks as it hits the water and seems sort of dislocated and misaligned? That’s the closest thing I can think of to describe how it felt to be me again.