I have just been looking at a photograph of B at her daughter's wedding a few months ago. I see a woman in her early to mid sixties, something indefinably of Liverpool in her features, a certain shyness as well, reserve and determination, but what I mostly see is a dialectic between the face of the young woman I remember beneath the surface and that of the woman in the photograph, so that I do not just see the face of a woman in her early sixties, but her history, or such history as is known by me. It's the physical crumbling away of a younger face that I see, the face in time, not just the surface appearance of a stranger whose history is not to be so easily read in the present of their face ...