Dragged in, rather against my will, to an obviously hopeless churchy jumble sale, by one of the eleven or twelve most intriguing people in the entire world – albeit an autonomous agent at present firmly in the grip of a no doubt transient passion (for what, my dear Tristanne, is not transient?) for exotic fabrics – I find to my astonishment that there is indeed something hidden deep within one of these weary, much-buffeted cardboard boxes that I am suddenly eager to buy. Yes. A small book called, I confess, Sayings of the Saints – collected by Annie Matheson (Eveleigh Nash, never heard of them, 1908). Not an area I am very likely to do any further research in now, I should guess – (and for the general health of one’s heart, head, health and habit, one surely ought not to go about reading only those glorious views which one already agrees with?) – but, more than anything else, this little book takes me instantly back to the world, physical and spiritual, of my ever more precariously-sited grandmother – my mother’s mother. Can it really, already, be over fifty years ago that I used to visit her in a neat little not quite poverty-stricken flat just round the corner from more or less hereabouts? (Yes, my lovely (if somewhat non-existent) children. Yes; it certainly can.)

No amount of cold probability theorising and mere absence of actual evidence could quite dispel the irrational feeling that gripped me as soon as I first set eyes on this small book: the sense ...