I could never quite get the hang of this life thing, this process that seemed to occupy so much of other people’s time. I recall a few occasions when my attempts at engaging with it resulted in a smack of the hand across the backside or back of the legs (and this in school for getting something wrong) or a couple of strokes across the backside with ‘the dap’. Invariably there’d be no explanation of my misdemeanour, presumably I was expected to understand what I’d done wrong – and this was all before the age of ten, the age at which my grandfather went down the pit with his father. We are children of our times, and mine was the baby boomer, the post-war climate of austerity and rebuilding a brave new world. Despite the relative privations, it was a much more comfortable lifestyle than either my parents or grandparents had, so I have no complaints, but it baffled me. And then books came along. While classmates played football I’d be curled up somewhere with my nose in a book, exploring the world out there through the relative safety of the adventures of a fictitious child hero or historical/mythical character. I loved story time, from sitting with my mother to the more formal school classroom end of day sessions. Some of these stories have stayed with me through the intervening sixty-odd years, so there was power in their telling, a reminder that the oral shamanic and bardic traditions endure through the generations; books were just another way of getting the message across.