IT could have been a scene from a Dickens novel. A small child, five or six years old, shivering in rags, her nose pressed against the mullioned window of some eating house, in which an uncaring man, barely 12-inches away from that nose and comfortable in a leather armchair, tucked into a pie on the coldest night of the year.

The only differences were that the child was beautifully dressed in colourful eastern clothes and a warm jacket; the window, plate glass, was that of the Cowley Road branch of the Subway cafe chain, while the man – a far-from-uncaring me – ate a chocolate cookie and sipped Coca Cola on Tuesday afternoon, the warmest day of the year thus far. The leather chair was the only constant in the equation.

The girl’s large brown eyes stared enviously at the cookie, then accusingly at me. She did not return my warm smile.

Her mother was in animated conversation with two friends, unaware of her daughter piling on the guilt. Meanwhile the cookie stuck in my throat. I would gladly have bought the child a boxful of both just to escape the condemnation, but it wouldn’t have been the done thing.

Minutes felt like hours. Eventually I finished.

When I turned, the child and her mother had gone. What a relief!

Heading for the city centre, suddenly I saw them again. The child was making short work of a cookie much larger than the one she’d coveted – never giving me so much as a second glance.

THE couple were old – I suspect very old – small, frail, and out of place in the noisy, workmen-filled High Street.

A sleepy village in the Chilterns or the Cotswolds would have been more in keeping.

He, wearing an old-fashioned cap and she a tiny hat from another age, they held hands like a young courting couple as they looked to cross the street when temporary traffic lights brought traffic to a brief standstill.

They waited for fully five minutes after she had pulled him from the path of an approaching bus. She was not amused.

Minutes later the coast was clear. “Let’s make a dash for it,” said the man with surprising enthusiasm. She burst into laughter.

“I will if you think you can,” she said between chuckles. He saw the funny side and joined in, ensuring they missed another ‘window’.

Eventually they made a move. Still hand in hand, they shuffled at snail's pace to the other side where they were swallowed up in a large crocodile of tall foreign students.

FINALLY a notice on a soon-to-close store in Banbury: ‘All items £2. Some may cost more.’