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The thirty-year-old rose inside is only slightly the worse for wear. One petal is gone, plucked from it by my scruffy-haired sixteen-year-old self. The idiot. He felt the need to carry that petal around and show it to girls at the sort of parties where they’re always playing The Cure. Eventually, of course, he gave it away to one of them as they sat in a locked park, late one summer night.

There are other, lesser, damages. A leaf folded and split accidentally here, a thorn come loose and picking at the book’s bindings there. With each exposure, these things build up. That’s why, nowadays, my mother’s rose stays firmly pressed between its pages, safe in the pitch-black care of etched hawthorns and hyacinths, swaddled in its bubble wrap and Superman’s special plastic.

The next book on my bookshelf – and this is assuming we’re travelling east, as all young readers here learn to do ssss1 – the next book is a big hardback edition of my father’s Collected Works.

The inscription on the title page reads, ‘I’ll always be here for you, Tom’, and if you asked me to, I could reproduce every curl and line of that note from memory, even now. It’s a solid book with a lot of wear, pages thumbed, corners folded, passages underlined. A collector’s bookshop might describe it as ‘heavily used’, but if it were a teddy bear, you wouldn’t hesitate to call it ‘well loved’.