But it also serves to release us for a time from the definitions that confine our daily selves; to unplug us from a world that wounds and disappoints us, allowing us to venture into places of magic and transformation. Though of late my writing has concerned itself more and more with detailing that wounded, disappointing reality, as a reader I have rediscovered the pleasures, of unrepentant escapism: the short fiction of Lord Dunsany, early Yeats poems, the paintings of Samuel Palmer and Ernst Fuchs.

The author who wrote Weaveworld has, however, disappeared. I've not lost faith with the enchantments of fantasy, but there is a kind of easy sweetness in this book that would not, at least presently, come readily from my pen. We go through seasons perhaps; and Weaveworld was written in a balmier time. Perhaps there'll be another. But its tender inventions seem very remote from the man writing these words.

Maybe that's why, when I sat down to work this morning, I thought of that sill in North Wales, and the orchard and the wall and the meadow. They too are remote, yet - like the copy of Weaveworld that sits beside me on the desk they are here with me still; part of my past, and yet present.

That which is imagined need never be lost, runs the epigram in the book of faery-tales Mimi Laschenski leaves in her granddaughter's keeping. The book will become a repository, before the story of Weaveworld is told; a place where vulnerable enchantments can take refuge. So inner and outer books, tales of Faerie and of Fugue, collapse into a single idea, the same precious idea that brings readers to bookstores with battered copies to be signed, and me, back to memories of a sill and an orchard to set before you. It's such a simple idea, but it still seems to me miraculous: that in words we may preserve ideas and images precious to us. Not only Preserve them, but pass them on. To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable.