FRANCIS GAY

WARREN fits blinds for a living. He is usually left to get on with it. But in this house the lady employing him seemed intent on watching his every move.

After a while he got a little annoyed. Then he got a more annoyed. Finally he asked if he wasn’t doing a good enough job.

“Oh, my dear!” the lady said, surprised. “I wasn’t watching you. I wasn’t really watching anything. I was just missing my husband who used to do this sort of thing.”

Her critical eye had all been in his imagination. And that’s probably the case more often than we know.

A discount and a hug as he left was all Warren could do, but the rest of us might judge each other a little more kindly because of his experience. ALEC has an unusual take on race, nationality and all those things that too often separate us. He says they may be more superficial than we imagine.

Well, he’s an educated, well-travelled man of the world, so I asked him if he had had some kind of eye-opening experience that led to this conclusion.

“Three experiences,” he replied. “I saw three individuals – one in India, one in the USA and one in the Philippines – look at something and I saw the same rapture and excitement each time.”

“Who were these people?” I asked. “And what were they looking at that showed they were, at heart, despite their different cultures, the same?”

“They were three two-year-old boys,” Alec replied. “And they were watching bin lorries!”