I wish to make it clear that I am not one of those people who regularly write to writers. I have a friend (or rather had a friend, since I see almost nobody I used to know now) who travels the world taking up invitations sent to him by famous authors in response to the fan letters he sends to them. He claims a ninety-five per cent success rate. It seems that only five out of every hundred successful writers are not so flattered by a letter from an unknown admirer that they are able to resist writing back immediately offering him a bed. He came down to see Camilla and me a couple of years ago when he was in these parts – I think he’d mistimed a visit to John Fowles and found Le Carré out – but Camilla wouldn’t even let him sleep in the bath. ‘He has a disgusting compulsion to adopt the prone position in the houses of people whose intelligence he fears,’ she whispered to me. ‘I’m not having him supine under this roof.’ I couldn’t be as hard on him as Camilla. Partly because he was my friend, and partly because I’m more susceptible to ingratiation; I don’t mind it if someone wants to lie down close to me. So I let him sleep in the outside toilet – we were living in another of Camilla’s dream cottages at the time – and I even secretly lent him Camilla’s sleeping bag. I suspect he would have preferred sleeping in mine if I’d had one, but at least he didn’t go away entirely empty handed. I mention my friend only to demonstrate that I know what motivates people to write to writers and that I was not similarly driven when I wrote to Camilla Marteline. I simply felt that here was a case in which I had special rights and interests, that was all. Reviewers are always talking about the way books change their lives – they undergo a major existential convulsion a week, some of them; well, I’m a touch less responsive to the written word myself, but Camilla’s pamphlet certainly changed something for me, if only in the sense that it restored me some antecedent pride, or at least, if that’s going too far, lightened the burden of antecedent shame. I wrote thanking her for what she’d done for me in the hope that she could do still more. Perhaps it made a difference that she was a woman, I don’t know. I am convinced that I would have communicated with the author of Hardy’s Jaunt With Mrs Henniker: or the Duffer in the Puffer even if it had been a man, but I am prepared to admit that I might have waited for the reply with less impatience.