Couples.

The couple walking up the hill was bent into a wind; or rather, were: she slightly ahead, he struggling. We crossed the road just ahead of them. Recognition: she was the mother of my two grown-up children; he, the man who married her later.

Two couples, a partner of each who were once married to each other, had converged on a corner in one of those disjointed greetings that grow out of sudden recognition.

Cordial now, have been for years: children in common. They had had a child. We had had three. Total: six.

This week, we baptise a great-grandchild. A generation seems to have been overlooked. How did that happen?

How? Years collide, crash; like waves on Inverloch beach in 1978 when I filmed on Super 8 the innocent gold optimistic sunset like the colours on her yellow and ref caftan, while a one-year-old child staggered on the sand as she watched, sitting, the fluctuating breeze alternately flicking her long auburn hair, revealing and obscuring her pale face, and later set the three-minute unedited Ektachrome celluloid clicking through the projector gate to a Gheorghe Zamfir track - a cliche that I then thought evocative.