I was up a long ladder cleaning the top of my grandmother’s kitchen cupboards while she supervised. Mostly I was checking sell-by dates on food items, and lying to her about them. When I found a box of ‘Apple-Cinnamon Breakfast Clusters’ that should have been eaten by 1998, I told her they had expired a year ago. Before she could say “Oh, they’ll be alright then”, I said, “the sparrows and squirrels will LOVE them”.

Later I was walking through a dismal Birmingham city centre when I realised that the new dry stone wall in the street had been built out of discarded shoes.