Now. I enjoy what I do for a living, the children are here and I am still happily married after 25 years.

But the years 1895 to 1900 which are the staple of this story exceed in vividness, variety and exertion anything I have known—except of course the opening months of the Great War. When I look back upon them I cannot but return my sincere thanks to the high gods for the gift of existence. All the days were good and each day better than the other. Ups and downs, risks and journeys, but always the sense of motion, and the illusion of hope.

On holiday in Orlando with my wife, Kate, and kids just before lockdown. I wasn’t drinking or gambling. I was so happy, so at peace with myself – I’d been searching for that for many a year.

When I was a young girl in Sydney, I used to go running with my dad. I would wake him up at the crack of dawn and we had this route to the top of a golf course – we’d usually make it there for sunrise.

Perfection is a second-rate idea. I would guess, however, that perfected happiness would be joy, the most intricate and mercurial of all sensations. The moment one recognizes joy, it flees. I’m not sure where Proust is going with this line of questioning, and I don’t want to be evasive, so I will say my idea of perfect happiness is the end of economics; we grow like flowers and fly like birds; the lion lays down with the lamb—a ridiculous idea.

I would like to die in good health, at an old age, in a house on a mountain that looks out over the ocean, dreaming about everyone and everything I have had the impossible good fortune to have loved. Maybe Ralph Stanley is singing “Angel Band.”