Once upon a time, much more than twenty years ago, a girl’s voice on the telephone was telling me she wanted to see me urgently, about something very important. She arrived and was extremely beautiful, with heavy eyelids and long, blonde hair. She was dressed in white. Without much preliminary chat she told me that she had discovered that she was an angel of God. She decided to share this secret with various religious leaders so she called on a Catholic cardinal, who said perhaps he could find her work with young people. An Anglican bishop asked if she had a family history of mental instability. A leading Methodist said he could recommend a reliable psychiatrist. She had come to me as the statutory atheist for a fourth opinion, and I told her that I had no doubt at all that she was, in fact, a genuine angel. This seemed to reassure her, because then went to lunch at Alvaro’s, and saw each other from time to time until she took up with a colony of Sufis and emigrated to France. A short while ago, almost in the present, I went to lunch in the country, and there was the angel again: a smiling, short-haired, middle-aged woman wearing woollen stockings and sensible shoes, surrounded by her cousins. Time devours most things, including angels.

(John Mortimer, Murderers and Other Friends.)