I remember luggage racks on trains being made of netting strung across steel frames.

I remember lots of things about Maggie Boyle, her voice, her flute and bodhran playing, her kindness (she introduced me to loads of people when I was starting out in journalism), but my favourite is when Eliot saw one of her publicity shots – with Maggie looking at her most stunningly gorgeous - propped up on a shelf and asked me if that was my new girlfriend. I wish!

I remember a quote from Henry James - ‘the imagination of disaster’ - that Rupert Christiansen uses in his memoire I Know You’re Going To Be Happy. He uses it to explain the way his mother had ‘an intense superstitious fear of imminent catastrophe’. Around about the same time I came across the phrase, we had to take Padstow to the vet. The vet, taking the cat’s temperature, mentioned that she didn’t like it very much. That night, Margaret said: ‘Do you think she has a tumour?’ ‘No – she just doesn’t like having a thermometer shoved up her bum!’

I remember beating my then girlfriend’s little brother at Monopoly. He screamed the house down. I think I was supposed to let him win.

I remember the bar of Turkish Delight my sister gave me for father’s day this year.