‘I’ve never been much of a man for religion myself,’ said Bob Curran. ‘My dad was a tinker and all tinkers are atheists. We used to have a lot of fun, I remember, on Thursday evenings in the old days. You know, belly of pork and cider and somebody would give a talk Causal Necessity and then there’d be one hell of a discussion afterwards. All in our front parlour, you know, with The Death of Nelson above the Joanna.’ Bob Curran was a very lean man of fifty-seven, a radio salesman recovering from schizophrenia. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that people had more faith in those days. They believed more. Why, I do believe that my old man, who was nothing more than an ignorant old tinker, believed more in there not being a God than some of these religious sods today believe in there being one. It’s a funny old world,’ he concluded, as he always did.