“My mother’s ashes were sprinkled on a lovely little road that ran from Bridlington,” he told me. “At the end of the road was a Gypsy encampment, so not many people ever turned down this road. But we did. I think this life is a big mystery. And there could be another.”

Is he saying he believes in an afterlife?

“There could be,” he answered in an earnest tone. “I think about these things now. You could move to a new dimension. In mathematics, they now have 10 dimensions, 12 dimensions. Well, we only have three dimensions, four if we count time. But time is the great mystery, isn’t it? I think it was St. Augustine who said if you ask me what time is, I do not know. But if you don’t ask me, I do know.”

As he mulled on time in the abstract sense, the day was getting on. I was curious to ask him whether he thought his new works represent an official “late style,” with all that implies about a break from the past.

“You don’t know what a late style is, actually, until it is finished,” he replied, taking another drag on his cigarette. “And the work is finished when you fall over. That’s what is going to happen. I will just fall over one day.”