Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things.

There are books in my library, such that it is, which have held within them excitement, knowledge, curiosity and anguish. There are books between whose covers I have found yearning, disgust, loyalty and contempt. There are many which have brought pleasure, a few with the strange gift of boredom, and some, just a handful, which have changed my life. Not in the way that all things do, each new experience making minor adjustments, but in the way that shows, decades later, in the makeup of my world. The first of these are lost to me. I am told I was besotted with a particular ABC, and the illustrations of Shirley Hughes continued throughout my own children’s early years, to resemble my idealised family life to a suspicious degree. The Maggie B, by Irene Haas may well underscore my concept of cosy, and I dare say the smallfolk I nearly glimpse beneath the trees in dappled sunlight have been seen first on a page, from the haven of my mother’s lap. One, likely some, of these early books has changed my life, turning me into a reader and lover of stories before I can remember otherwise. But I want to talk here about the first clear memory, the lucid revelation, of the world I build my life in.

Now, before I go on, I want to make it clear, that this is an overstatement. I go to work, I raise my kids, I talk to my partner about supermarket shopping and fuel costs. I rarely wear impractical clothing, my hair floofs in the rain and bothers my face, and I worry about privacy to pee on a long day hike. I am anchored in reality, please rest assured. And yet…. Around the edges, those smallfolk skitter, I see wisdom in the faces of trees, and magic fizzes in the breeze. After all, there is nothing like looking, if you want to find something.

I win no prizes for originality here, but perhaps that’s part of the seduction. Perhaps it is in the reinvention of the wheel that each new generation finds value in it, and keeps it turning, feeling the hand of their forefathers beneath their own as they do. And it is the hand of my own father who turned the pages as we lay, one night in my brother’s bed, the next in my own, back and forth, the three of us nestled in familial safety, sharing a story to build a bridge from the day, into dreaming.

I was seven, or eight, when my Dad first read us The Hobbit. Already, as I say, a lover of stories. But this one! This one, I stepped with Bilbo, out from the safety of home, the certainty of three meals a day, of dry beds and gentle pastures, and into an adventure! My own little company – my dad, my brother and I – we stayed warm and dry, snuggled against one another in polyester pyjamas, and at the same time, we passed through mountains. And like Bilbo, I emerged the same, and forever changed.

Nearly four decades on, and there remain tell-tale signs in the makeup of my world. I have been fortunate to travel, a lot and often, moving to another continent when I was 11, and back, a few years later, living on the road for three months, six months, a year at a time at various stages of my life. My travels now are shorter. Three weeks, one week, one day. But I step out of my front door looking for adventure, and I find it. I have grown good at this. Yes, I thirst for the grand adventures, to see mountains and oceans and temples and cities I have not seen before, to feel small and valid all at once before a world thick with cultural, geological, magical stories. But now, there is adventure in the alley I never spotted before and in the path that changes as the Hawthorn flowers. There is adventure in a new project or challenge. And there is adventure right here, right now, writing this.

Perhaps this was mine anyway. Perhaps another story would have brought me here. But this is the one I remember. The plot details are hazy, even now, but the feeling persists. The Hobbit was a sonnet to the story. A work of passion for stories past, present and future. Even at 8 that love, that commitment to storying shone through. A story full of stories – stories told to remember, to warn, to make sense, to connect and to divide. Powered only by words, symbols for things and ideas, strung together to convey a thing that happened inside one mind, to the inside of another mind. Many years on, and this still matters, not just in the tingle of excitement I feel when I meet a story steeped in story telling passion, but in the way I build my life here. What we tell of our own lives, and how we tell it, shapes both our own world and the larger one we share. Stories are transformative, and we tell them to ourselves all the time.

The Hobbit is a ripping yarn, but, for me, (and lets hold in mind I was born three decades after war loomed large in the British psyche) it was more. In The Hobbit, I found resonance. The small, ordinary character, with his need for two breakfasts and his love of home, taking on a monumental adventure and finding himself, with his friends about him, equal to the task. All told in a story laced with an understanding of its own magic. About three decades on from my first reading, I placed that story in the hands of my own children’s Daddy, and in the warm glow of home, while the smallfolk nestled in the shadowed corners of the room, we stepped again into a hole in the ground, in which there lived a Hobbit…