I Rather Like Getting Away From Fiction.

Language Tethers Us To The World; Without It We Spin Like Atoms.

Perhaps I Shall Not Write My Account Of The Paleolithic At All, But Make A Film Of It. A Silent Film At That, In Which I Shall Show You First The Great Slumbering Rocks Of The Cambrian Period, And Move From Those To The Mountains Of Wales...from Ordovician To Devonian, On The Lush Glowing Cotswolds, On To The White Cliffs Of Dover... An Impressionistic, Dreaming Film, In Which The Folded Rocks Arise And Flower And Grow And Become Salisbury Cathedral And York Minster.

I Can Walk About London And See A Society That Seems An Absolutely Revolutionary Change From The 1950s, That Seems Completely And Utterly Different, And Then I Can Pick Up On Something Where You Suddenly See That It's Not.

The Consideration Of Change Over The Century Is About Loss, Though I Think That Social Change Is Gain Rather Than Loss.

The Place Didn't Look The Same But It Felt The Same; Sensations Clutched And Transformed Me. I Stood Outside Some Concrete And Plate-glass Tower-block, Picked A Handful Of Eucalyptus Leaves From A Branch, Crushed Them In My Hand, Smelt, And Tears Came To My Eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, On A Pavement Awash With Packaged American Matrons, Crying Not In Grief But In Wonder That Nothing Is Ever Lost, That Everything Can Be Retrieved, That A Lifetime Is Not Linear But Instant. That, Inside The Head, Everything Happens At Once.