If you are brilliant, it’s different—not because there is envy or rejection from the other kids, so much, but because the things that interest you are alien. If you are what Stella was—what I touched upon and let go when she died—then you see an added layer in the world and under it. A waterwheel is a waterwheel, but it is also a variable, a stand-in for the mathematics of rotation and therefore for the planet, and that in turn leads you to wonder if there is a relationship between the behaviour of galaxies and millstreams, and then you find yourself considering cavitation and then you’re wondering whether space and time themselves might be susceptible to a form of super-cavitation, and then when that seems still too irritatingly approximate you express the whole thing in numbers and you’re reaching for the as yet undefined. How do you share that urge over chocolate milk? How do you, as a child, begin to communicate the glimpse you’ve had of the substrate?