I had picked up the book from the shelves at the top of the stairs. When I am too tired to read anything useful in bed, I go to old and familiar friends that I know I can re-read and enjoy as pure relaxation without having to concentrate or analyse. This one I hadn’t read for a good few years, but it caught my eye and attention as my son and I had been talking about a picture he had ‘acquired’ on a visit home long ago.

The painting had been on my wall, the oils barely dry. “I like that.” It reminded him, he said, of a book we had both enjoyed when he was in his teens and read every sci-fi and fantasy on my shelves… usually by the light of the street lamp outside his bedroom window. I knew the book without him having to name it…