The green is fresh. Life returns. In winter the branches are like veins in the sky. And the roots are as plentiful as the branches above, reaching down into the earth and drawing up water as the branches reach and draw air from the sky, and our planet is succoured by their good exchanges, and we walk tiny in their shade… I feel my mind jump, my brain… Is that what she was telling me about? The nanobots, mending a plank in my mind? The fields beyond glow green, a sea of grass and waves pass across it and the earth changes its expression like a lover when you search in his eyes. Bill was a skinny bony boy, awkward and didn’t know how to talk except if he ever had a drink, he had poems in his head, and out they came spilling over me. He was serious and intense. I was used to laughing – my father laughed all the time, but Bill – his house had no laughter. I wanted to teach him how. Look now, houses sprouting from the fields and people are here. A town. Everyone. So many of them. Oh Bill, will I see you again? In heaven? Like Cecilia said? I’ve never believed it. Dead is dead and dust is what you are, my lovely man. I won’t think of it. I’m going to be here now. Here in this second lease of unexpected life, here at the far end of everything, of everything that was mine, I mean. Home, job, family, marriage, little children, all ended, and I’d almost ended too, and been packed up, ready to go on my last journey. My day was done, almost, and everything that was my life had gone. Yet here I am, free of all of it, and totally, utterly alive. Driving along in a fast car, a robot by my side. Who would have guessed my days of old age would be like this?

‘This is the place, I suppose,’ I say. ‘Look at all the people here. They’re wondering who I am. They’ll find out in a minute.’

When we get on the stage, the crowd of journalists strike me as little more than an unruly mob of overgrown schoolchildren, at an assembly in a troubled inner-city school. I know how to quell such a group.

Mr Stephen Jordan, CEO of Eldercare, starts things off. He’s polished, that one. Glossy. Slightly orange, too. He thinks the world of himself, I imagine. He’s done a good job, I’ll say that for him. I wouldn’t be standing here without him. But he’s not my cup of tea.

He smiles a lot, and he has a slick patter. The journalists are hanging on his every word. He’s famous, you see.