‘The thing about life is that if you get it wrong you can’t go back.’ There were two kinds of people, he said: those who lived their lives in the prolonged moment of panic in which they first realised this – ‘They have no idea where the door is now, let alone how to get it open if they could find it’ and who therefore spent their lives thrashing about in what he called ‘the disorder of hearing it click shut behind them’. The other kind, after a single awful pang, ‘one fast look back’, decide to make the best of whatever happens next. ‘Those people go on,’ he finished: ‘They’re still hoping for something good.’