Our drop-off at that school is a loop, and the accessible space is at the top of the loop by the flagpole, and for something like four school years I sat in a line of cars behind a woman in a grey hatchback who would get out, go round, open the hatch, take out a wheelchair, snap something into place, open the passenger door, and help a girl across.

I watched that happen perhaps six hundred times.

And I could not have told you one single thing about that chair.

Not the colour.

Not whether it had armrests.

Not whether the woman was lifting it or carrying it or whether it folded, which tells you what kind of chair it is and therefore most of what you need to know.

I had four years of daily, unobstructed, eleven-feet-away observation of a child’s mobility equipment and I retained nothing, because I was in a queue, and because I was thinking about a conference call at nine, and because there is a thing we do with other people’s difficulty where we look directly at it and file it under handled.