My thumb brushes over the buttons of the remote control, pausing above the one that might connect me to a church service back home. Easter Sunday, alone, with no cooking duties to bring our family together, and no reason for an extra phone call to my mother, I’m not sure what I should be doing on this blue April morning, even as millions of others are waking to a familiar script and clear instructions. Christmas is simple, with its modest insistence on good cheer and homecoming, everyone back to the nest and the secular rituals around a kitchen table, while Easter mixes death and celebration, a resurrection as terrifying as crucifixion, a story barely a hundred generations old, so that even the non-believer has to pause before its proximity and mystery, and on this particular morning some part of me wants to be overwhelmed by the myth, take part in the ceremony, join the hymn, and maybe receive a little guidance, but I leave the TV switched off, and then the doorbell rings.

I’d never been to an airport, certainly not on a school night. My father had packed a thermos of coffee, telling my mother we were just going for a drive. He always had a tape playing in the car, some endless wailing of guitars and no real tune that I could make out, but tonight, as we drove through the empty city, watching traffic lights change silently for no one but us, I heard something else. No guitars or drums, no verse or chorus; a classical music that was epic and sweeping, but also repetitive, hypnotic. The sound was cold and metallic, the voice robotic, sometimes menacing, sometimes joyful, and I caught a few words that I’d learned in first-year German. As we left the city and turned onto the motorway, I let the music synchronise with the rhythms of the road, each lamp-post arriving with a tinny beep, so that we were sliding through a corridor of sound and light.

One tree stands alone in the corner of our garden, and this autumn we had it cut back. When I got home from work to see what the gardeners had done, I stumbled on a crime scene. Under a forensics lamp, a squad of professionals were packing away their cutters and pouring water over their hands, while the chief took photos of the amputated body. In the apartments over the wall, a woman stood on her balcony, arms folded, no hint of gratitude for her new corridor of sunlight. She finished her cigarette and turned away.

When she snuck into the kitchen, her parents were staring at the open pages of a funeral brochure, her mother’s finger resting on one of the photos while her father looked over his wife’s shoulder, a hand clamped over his mouth. They might have been working on a crossword.

The man had not left the museum for some decades, yet no one could remember when or why he had entered. Staff had come and gone but no one knew his name or from where he had arrived; no photograph recorded his early years in the place or any previous life he may have led. The man was part of the museum, that much was sure, but no one would have called it his home.

London, 17 October 1973

Relaxed and elegantly coiffed in his warm television studio, Brian Clough shares his genius with the nation. On this gloomy London night, England must beat Poland to reach football’s World Cup finals. The opposition are certainly no pushovers, they offer a little more skill and flair than most teams from the Soviet bloc, but the brilliant mind of Brian has uncovered a weakness in the Polish side: “That clown at the other end of the pitch,” he says of the Polish goalkeeper, drawing uncomfortable frowns from the other pundits sat around the table.