First off I want to tell you (and can I just say how I just love it when someone begins with ‘first off’ because I know I’m in for a real treat, I am sitting just a bit more upright, poised and ready thinking: gwan gwan gwan) I read Wuthering Heights with only the barest of attention - first, because it was compulsory reading and second because it began written in a Yorkshire dialect which I had not yet heard aloud and which struck me as stupid and mannered for the sake of it.

Neither did the teacher explain what a moor was, though we had muskeg which is a kind of cousin, and for the first time ever in my reading life — which to that point had been voracious and catholic in its tastes — I struggled to unpick the story from all those such trappings which made it legible but unintelligible to me, like an instruction manual in a trade language for a machine I had never seen.

A decade later I had been in England a while, and married a Lancashireman who took me across the Pennines to see Haworth, home of those sisters. In the damp air, under a sky like a bruise everything in the novel clicked in my mind like the tumblers in a lock, and I quite literally thought, oh.

I’ve been thinking about it today, how deeply that novel is informed by knowledge of the place and people where it is set, knowledge that comes from a lived context and how that is no small part of its power — ultimately why it feels true. Though the truth of it extends beyond that context, it absolutely proceeds from it.

Not for the first time I’m also thinking about how the basis for so much of life is a desire to escape context - to find a sideways place to be in without relation to place, or people, to just be wholly yourself. What I mean is how much of my life has been that desire, but maybe it’s not only me.

This is just to say that today for the first time I realised that at the side of everything I write, just beyond peripheral vision is a lake whose waters are as cold in August as they are in January.

Can you feel it yet?