Shortly before November’s midterm elections I interviewed a Donald Trump supporter, coming out of a debate between three local candidates in a congressional race, asking how she felt about the president’s attitude to women. “I need to see the facts and the actual documentation,” she said. “I can’t just do all this hearsay.”

When I was 16 I stopped off in Holland, during a camping holiday with a friend. We bought as much marijuana as we could and smoked it all in an afternoon. Sat behind a housing estate in the border town of Nijmegen, we giggled, rambled and lay around until the local police came. They took us back to the campsite (we found the fact that they spoke Dutch hilarious), where we were asked for our passports and train tickets. They already had our number: a couple of idiots out of their minds and out of their depth. They told us to get on the next train in the direction of the port. We’d stopped laughing by then. We went home.

One of the last times I visited Andrea Levy, who died on Thursday evening, she chuckled with some mischief while describing the coffin of banana leaf and bamboo she had just picked out for herself.

Time, they say, heals all wounds. They also insist that once lost it is never found again because, like tides, it waits for no man. Indeed, of the many things people have said about time, nobody has ever endowed it alone with the capacity to solve intractable diplomatic entanglements, reverse bad decisions or provide an antidote to postcolonial hubris. Time, it has never been said, can find a unicorn.

“When I was coming up in Mississippi I never knew it was against the law to kill a black man,” the late Buford Posey told me when he was 79. “I learned that when I went in the army. I was 17 years old. When they told me I thought they were joking.” I was grateful for his candour. Back in the day they used to call it “nigger hunting”. A posse of “good ol’ boys” would head out in search of a black man to pay the price for his melanin and their inadequacies. It was a relief to have a white person offer an honest reflection on the racial mores of the time.

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, there is a moment when Augustine St Clare, who owns Tom, suggests that he is better off as a slave than he would be as a free man. “No,” insists Tom. “Why Tom?” asks St Clare. “You couldn’t possibly have earned, by your work, such clothes and such living as I have given you.” “Know’s all that Mas’r,” says Tom. “But I’d rather have poor clothes, poor house, poor everything and have ’em mine, than have the best, and have ’em any man else’s.”