Social mores change all the time. In the mid-1970s, it would've been astonishing, say, to see two men holding hands in the streets. And the attitude to having a fling with a girl, or whatever, was quite different then.

When I see gay people holding hands or kissing in the streets, I just don't think that's right.

The hands on a clock move without regard to the hands you hold.

I didn't do the marching down the streets, jumping in front of the lines and holding hands... that wasn't me.

Nothing, I learned, brings you into the present quite like holding hands. The past seemed irrelevant; the future, unnecessary.

Later, holding Milo’s hand in the dark, Jacob felt that it was only in recovering it that he learned what he had been in danger of losing. The touch of Milo’s hand seemed to remind him of parts of himself that he had already begun to forget about.