I have been thinking about patience, which is not a virtue I possess in any great quantity but which I have come, in my advancing years, to admire in others — and, more unexpectedly, in institutions.

Magistrate Hathaway took six days to write her judgment. Six days to produce twenty-six pages of close reasoning on the question of whether an empty building is the same thing as a vacant one. I suspect she knew the answer by the end of the hearing. I suspect she knew it before. But she took six days, because the law requires patience even when the facts do not, and because a judgment that arrives too quickly is a judgment that is questioned too easily.

Twenty-six pages. I cannot write twenty-six pages in six days. I am not sure I could write twenty-six pages in six weeks. But then, I am not required to be right. Hathaway is, and she took the time.

Thomas Garland was patient. He waited three hundred and twenty-eight years to be named — waited in the ground above Dunvale, in the grave he chose, where he could see the vale. He did not know he was waiting, which is perhaps the most perfect form of patience: the kind that asks for nothing, expects nothing, and is rewarded by accident. A drainage trench, twelve metres east. A foreman who stopped digging. An archaeologist who knew what she was looking at. A vicar who could read an old ledger.

Three hundred and twenty-eight years. And Bess Holloway, who has waited sixty-three years for a memorial to forty-one miners, stood up on Tuesday evening and said they had done right by the forty-second. That is patience married to purpose, which is the only marriage of the two that produces anything worth keeping.

The Midnight Gardener is patient. Five plantings in four weeks, each one between midnight and four in the morning, each one selected — we now learn — from the catalogue of wildflowers that grew on Caldecott Field before the square was paved in 1834. I do not know who the gardener is. I do not think it matters. What matters is that someone has remembered the meadow beneath the pavement and is putting it back, one planter at a time, with soil and seeds and a note pinned to the fountain.

“For the bees.” That is patience for you. Not for us. Not for the Parks Department. For the bees, who are patient because they have no concept of impatience, and who have returned — the brown-banded carder bee, absent from central Bobington for a decade — because the flowers they needed are finally there.

Prudence Holt is patient, and her name has never been more apt. Sixty per cent of Phase 1 copper, locked in at 648, while the remaining forty waits for whatever the market provides. She does not celebrate. She counts. Counting is the accountant’s form of patience, and it is the least romantic and most necessary kind.

Tom Compton is patient. Fifty-eight beacons fitted, one by one, each one a morning’s work, each one recorded in a blue exercise book that is becoming, without anyone having planned it, the most accurate fleet registry the harbour has possessed in thirty years. Thirty-two to go. He will fit them all. His uncle will watch and say nothing, which is how Comptons express approval.

Even the copper is patient. It falls, day after day — thirty-eight consecutive declines — with the implacable steadiness of something that was overvalued and knows it, and is making its way back to a price at which things can be built. The Kaelmar Strait is open. The ships are sailing. The insurance is being written. The only thing that was ever impatient about the copper crisis was the crisis itself, and the crisis is over.

I walked through Caldecott Square this morning. The marsh marigolds were open. Three bees were at work in the meadowsweet. The fountain was running. The tramway route — which will one day cross the square, if all goes according to a plan that has been patient enough to survive revision — is marked by nothing more than a few surveyor’s pegs, driven into ground that was once a meadow, and may yet remember it.

There is a shepherd on the ridge above Dunvale whose name is Thomas Garland. There always was. It simply took us a while to ask.