Every morning Al drove his car into the same car park and exchanged weather related banter with the attendant. Today the sky was grey and heavy and the attendant was nowhere to be seen. Al couldn’t shake a feeling of loneliness that weighed upon him. He imagined the Brighton conjoined twins, trapped above the Queen’s Arms public house in 1911, had felt just as lost. As he walked towards the entrance of the hospital, he remembered the year he was born: the year of the hijacker; the year of the first Earth Day; the year the King visited Nixon in the White House. Then he remembered 2008, a portentous year, when he had been part of a band that performed in the aftermath of a devastating tsunami that struck Japan. As the world’s financial order crumbled, he and his bandmates stayed on the stage playing uplifting notes to a shell-shocked crowd. Al went to visit his first patient of the day. The hospital was marketed as resembling a 5-star hotel but Al saw behind the façade. What he...