There was no room in my mind for anything else. I read, much later somewhere, about something called "flow" which is when you are so engaged in what you are doing, the rest of the world falls away. Musicians get it, and artists, and I felt it too – was part of the plane, the two of us one single unit, doing what we were both designed to do.

There was a bookshelf in the bathroom. Actually there was, I found out pretty smartly, a bookshelf in every single room in the house – at least one – as well as books piled up everywhere where the surface was more or less flat: books on the stairs, in the stairwell, under the beds, beside the beds.

I was about to make a sarcastic remark about how much faster Google would have been, but strangely it felt rather comforting getting my information from a book written by an expert, decreed correct by other experts and set down in paper and ink forever.