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 She said that not much had happened between us anyway, historically speaking. But history is a string full of knots, the best thing you can do is admire it, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing. A cat’s cradle. She said these sorts of feelings were dead, the feelings she once had for me. There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and colour what’s dead. It won’t complain. Then she laughed and said we probably saw what happened differently anyway… She laughed again and said that the way I saw it would make a good story, her vision was just the history, the nothing-at-all facts. She said she hoped I hadn’t kept any letters, silly to hang on to things that had no meaning. As though letters and photos made it more real, more dangerous. I told her I didn’t need her letters to remember what happened. (Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 1985)