[Illustration: John Sadler]

I RECENTLY listened again to an interview with the late, great Michael Mosley. He was talking about “reframing”.

Take an event, he said, any event, and reframe it by trying to experience it from the other person’s standpoint. That driver who shouted at you, he continued. Instead of being stressed by it, reframe it. Imagine what’s made him shout. Is he late for work? Is he about to get divorced? Does he have a six-year-old in hospital?

Reframing, said Dr Mosley, was a shortcut to making you happier and the world a better place.

I considered. I thought of my first visit to Camden market, when my reframing of an event had the opposite effect.

It was the 80s. Aged 17, my friend April and I were eager to leave behind the woods and fields of the countryside for the secrets and thrills of the city. We shimmied past racks of Afghan coats, long-haired boys who stood in Technicolor compared to their suburban counterparts, and breathed in the heady patchouli.

Towards the end of our visit, we realised that April had lost her wallet. Our train tickets were in it. No use looking at me. I had spent all my money on a purple velvet waistcoat dotted with gold thread. What to do?

Hitching was an option… although it would mean engaging in conversation with a potentially boring driver.

And then we spotted a policeman. He would know what to do.

To our astonishment, upon hearing the problem he took a £5 note out of his own wallet and handed it to us for the train fare home. We stood aghast. We couldn’t take his money.

But we had misunderstood. He tore a piece of paper from a little notebook and scribbled an address.

“It’s a loan,” he said. “You can send it back.”

I remember the scene clearly: the pale, kind face, blue eyes and grey, clinging hair; the paper fluttering in the evening wind; the spidery words in black biro; the folded fiver in April’s palm.

But when we got home, we realised to our consternation we had lost the piece of paper with the address.

It has always stayed with me. Constructing a whole story around it, I came to believe over the years that, because of us, the policeman had lost his faith in human nature. And that we had made him less sympathetic to others.

In my story, which I took to be true, he concluded we had taken him for a fool, and mark his words it would not be happening again.

Dr Mosley’s idea was to take an unpleasant event and, using empathy, reframe it from the other person’s point of view.

I realised I had done exactly that but in reverse, using empathy to reframe a pleasant event. And come to assume I had almost singlehandedly changed a policeman’s entire worldview.

Musing on Dr Mosley’s reframing, I reconsidered my long-ago policeman again. First, the story’s facts: the money and the lost address.

Secondly, the imagined world behind them: our small, treacherous act that destroyed his faith in human nature; the impact it had on his behaviour to others.

But was something else in fact possible? In an alternatively imagined scenario, perhaps he had guessed what had happened? Had avuncularly shrugged it off?

My mind, newly activated, raced with fresh versions. Could it even be he had never expected to get his money? Had therefore never given the two teenagers a second thought?

But we are taught to believe in stories. If not always actual events, certainly attendant meanings. Politicians trade on this, with winning candidates, good and bad, often being the more skilful weavers of tales.

It is hard to resist a good narrative. Which was why I had latched on so readily to Dr Mosley’s version of the shouting driver.

But perhaps it was that the driver shouted as a matter of course. That he was neither late for work nor in the throes of divorce, and his son wasn’t sick in hospital. That shouting was simply something he did. Either way, it was only a story.

Perhaps what Dr Mosley called reframing was just old-fashioned storytelling? Nothing wrong with that. Good storytelling holds truths, often moral truths. But it’s not the same as facts. And, god-like, the storyteller holds all the power.

The notion of storytelling, its power, and the faith it demands, also made me reflect on the recent general election.

Stories were told in abundance. Thick and fast they came from all sides and corners, presenting the world back to us in various shapes and forms. Choosing which to take depended on both the teller’s skill and stories that had shaped us to date. Ultimately, belief.

In the run-up to the presidential election, more stories will soon arrive from across the Atlantic; bombarding, vying, relentless.

And so, the world is no more than ever-competing tales.