The racket caused Sharon to sit bolt upright in our bed and me to be forcibly propelled from those moist, dark places underneath her arms into which it was my custom, immediately upon waking, to bury myself. I mention this small domestic detail not to be indelicate but because it proves that although I had little time for immaterialism or popular metaphysics, and did not welcome periodicals of the tele- or the para-anything, I was not some rigid earth-bound rationalist, confined merely to the here, the palpable and the now. In my private life especially, in the matters of those mysterious intimacies between men and women which seemed to spawn, in these days, so many Acts of Parliament – this was 1967, that annus mirabilis for consenting adults – I considered myself to be unusually open to experience: an adventurer, a seeker, a wayfarer who knew that the way forward might also be the route back and that in order to come up it was sometimes necessary to go down. Sharon was not a woman who needed any encouragement to allow the hairs on her body to grow when and where they wanted, but I encouraged her anyway; a fanatic horticulturalist, I urged on wild profusions of growth, so that when I plunged nose first into them I could be back in the primaeval forest, listening again to the blatherings of the macaws, the faraway insistent beat of native drums, and the closer, the much closer screech of the baboons.

Ours was not, is what I’m trying to convey, a spiritually diffident household, but that didn’t mean that I was pleased to find the current issue of The Finchley Zoist and Astral Traveller waiting for us amongst the wreckage of our hall furniture; still less that I was keen to read the article it contained concerning me.

Sharon was, though. She caught me on the point of feeding it down our mechanical sink tidy, took it from me and bore it back upstairs with her to the lavatory. It was also part of our relational intrepidity not to close doors, and I was able to hear her exclaiming ‘But that’s amazing!’ at regular intervals. When she came down again she was still wearing her reading spectacles which I took to mean that she wanted to read to me aloud. But first she offered to soften me up with one of her famous calculations. ‘Do you know’, she said, ‘that if you add together all the numerals in today’s date’ – it was the 12th day of the 8th month in the year 1967 – ‘and take away the number of pages in this paper’ – there were 8 – ‘plus the time it was delivered’ – on the stroke of 8.00 – ‘you will arrive at your age?’ I was 27. I think you will find that the mathematics work. I never checked myself. I had a sort of stunned and absolute faith in Sharon’s ability in the field of numerology.