Cirrus@Austlit

'Sometimes, If I can't get to sleep, I imagine I'm back in the house where I grew up. ('Grew up' is probably a stretch - we lived there for nearly seven years, beginning when I was eight, but it was the longest we'd lived anywhere and when the time finally came, I found it hard to countenance the idea of leaving.) It was an old cottage on a hill in south-east England, and it had creaking floorboards, beamed ceilings and a long, unruly garden. There'd been a death upstairs the year before we moved in - one of the previous owners had had cancer and passed away in the master bedroom, surrounded by his family - but it was a peaceful house, and at well over a hundred years old must have witnessed more than one life reach its end. I like to go back there in my mind's eye, conjuring the slightly crooked hallway, the doors that never neatly fit their frames, the tiny kitchen with its overwhelmingly wheaten spectrum of 1980s browns. Like handwriting on old foolscap, the more specific details have long faded with time, but the feeling remains: that ineffable sense of calm and familiarity that I associate with being home.' (Publication summary)