This led to a set of rules (play cannot begin before crossing East Blithedale Avenue), then subrules (crossing means reaching the always arguable halfway point of the avenue) […].

The band has polished its performance since the last concert.

Théophile Gautier’s love of cats was notable even in his ailurophiliac time and place. One of his favourites, Madame Théophile, was ‘so called because she lived with me on a footing of conjugal intimacy’, following him everywhere and at mealtime often hooking morsels ‘on their way from my plate to my mouth’.

It is a confrontation and invasion of the eternal into the temporal, what Paul Tillich also refers to in the biblical term kairos as distinguished from chronos or common linear time. Kairos is time qualified by eternal relevance, time that is of significance to the Eternal because it is disturbed by and invested with the eternal.