I have lived so many lives through books, gone to so many places, so many eras, looked through so many different eyes, considered so many different points of view. The fact that I haven’t had time to do much myself seems but a small price to pay. I live my life quite as fully as I want, thank you. Books have not isolated me – they have connected me. What non-bookworms get by meeting actual people, we get from reading.

Stop a while, the safe, solid brick walls seemed to say, like generations of a certain kind of seeker after a certain kind of pleasure have done before you. Take your time. The books are here. You’ve got them. They’ve got you. What is it you’re looking for? An hour’s escapism? A quick explanation of a DIY problem that’s foxed you? A history lesson? A long investigation into some of the weightiest moral and philosophical issues that men have wrestled with down the ages? We’ve got ’em. And good radiators too.

'And where was I?’ I asked.
‘Where do you think you were?’ she said. ‘You were at home. Reading. We told you we were going every time and you never broke eye contact with your stupid books. Sometimes you’d wave goodbye as you turned a page.'
I have wracked my brains, but I truly do not remember them going. I would question her veracity but a) I’m scared of her, and b) there’s no point. They surely went and I as surely didn’t notice. Such was the hold of a book back then. The intensity of childhood reading, the instant and complete absorption in a book – a good book, a bad book, in any kind of book – is something I would give much to recapture.

On rereading, then, I learned that Anne Shirley is indeed a dear and most loveable child. Who could not, after all, adore anyone who insists that her name be spelled with the ‘e’ – ‘so much more distinguished. If you’ll only call me Anne with an e I shall try to reconcile myself to not being called Cordelia.

She proceeds, through her odd way of seeing things, through her patently honest love of beauty and endearing attempts to master her various jealousies and yearnings, to win over the Cuthberts, their neighbours and millions of readers who have met her over the years since the book was first published. When I settle down with it these days, it is the gradual softening of Marilla that seems to me the true miracle of the book, but this only reminds me again of the great truth that you are never too young to start rereading.