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Sister Bronwyn continued. "Midnight is cocktail and canapé time.' Seeing Hattie's eyes widen, she said, 'Don't worry I'm not running some illegal gin joint here. You'll get the idea. Then, one o'clock through till three is special request time. We had a silent disco one night, and another time we turned the day room into a haunted house. I had a hell of a job talking Ada out of Murder on the Orient Express but she saw my point eventually and we came to a compromise with a High Tea instead.'

It occurred to Hattie that the odds of two people finding each other in a world of several billion were infinitesimally small. Especiall two people who were alike enough - and at the same time different enough - to stay together for life. Finding a suitable mate must boil down to convenience, of finding someone receptive at the right time. Hattie had never considered that she might have missed on a relationship. She had enough worldly wisdom to know that there were plenty who settled for the wrong person. In that respect she counted herself lucky. Having never experienced romantic love, she'd never been forced to endure the pain of its loss.

The program was filmed in the outback, a dusty train travelling along a track. The blue of the cloudless sky and red of the dusty earth were so vivid they looked as if they had come from opposite sides of an artist's colour wheel. Every minute or so, the view would change, the camera filming either the view from a passenger carriage, a panning shot of the train passing by from the ground or a bird's-eye view of the entire train snaking below. The television, Hattie now realised, wasn't muted at all, the gentle clackety-clack, clickety-clack of the wheels on the track the only sound, mesmerising and strangely soothing. There was no commentary; no dialogue. Slow television was made for a place like Woodlands.

Murray laughed, and Walter felt a twitch of envy. It wasn't that he begrudged Murray a chuckle - laughter was supposedly the best medicine, after all - it was more that he wanted to be the one to make his friend laugh. He was the funny guy. Funny was who he was. It was all he had left.