For as long as you’ve known me, I’ve been obsessed to the point of, well, obsession, about time. Separately, I have also taken every opportunity to insist that thrillers and romances are exactly the same genre.

That’s not an opportunity that comes up very often, not unless you contort conversations in that direction. And I have.

But here I am, with a love of thrillers, a love of romances, an obsession with time, and all of this for all of my life — and it was only last night that I realised these are not three different things. They’re not even two different things.

I was re-watching “The Bourne Identity” by Tony Gilroy, rebelliously loosely based on Robert Ludlum’s novel. Hopefully without spoiling a very good film, I want to say that there is a moment where you are supposed to believe a certain character is in a certain place. It isn’t overblown, isn’t a gigantic deal, but effort is made to make you think it is this particular character.

It works. I mean, I believe you’re fooled — I’ve now seen this film so many times that I can’t remember what I first thought — but I also mean that if it had been the character you thought, it works. That character, at that point, with this about to happen to him, the whole film has correctly delivered him to this essential point.

Even the time it’s just taken you to read this is far longer than the moment in the film. But you’ve gathered that it’s not the character you’re supposed to believe, it’s a different one — yet it still works.

It works in a different way, but again it’s ultimately that this character at this point, about to have this thing happen to him, he has been delivered here and we have been delivered to this point right alongside him.

Seriously, he’s walking down the street and I’m thinking buggersticks, another reason that thrillers and romances are the same is that they are both about time.

There’s the time in the sense of the two hours of the movie, what it does to get characters where they go. There’s time in the sense of the storytelling and pace.

But there’s also the intricacy that I think you associate with time stories. I don’t care about time machines, I’ve no interest in a TARDIS, but I am besotted with characters being caught up in events and situations that are different depending on when you look. That depend on which direction you’re facing, or the temporal equivalent of that.

The temporal equivalent of that. There’s a phrase. There’s an overblown phrase.

All stories move their characters through situations, all of them are paced by the writer as well as having pace in the story.

So I started by merely believing for my entire life that romances and thrillers are the same thing — look, short version, they share tension and they tend to revolve around one key moment of will they, won’t they. In a thriller, it’s will they or won’t they survive, whereas in a romance, it’s exactly the same.

But now my profound realisation is that all stories are really all about time.

I’d rather my profound realisations be less than so fantastically obvious, but otherwise I have no problem with this.

Except that the battery on my iPad is about to die any second now and somehow this seems to me to be rather approp