Strolling around my garden with the sun on my skin, the sea undulating against the rocky beach below, eagles chittering their silvery cry across the bay, I slipped into a state that I used to inhabit as a child — an imaginative trance in which, even as the soles of my bare feet pressed down on the soft prickle of damp grass, I found myself climbing up a steep bank, skidding on loose, dry soil, steadying myself against the silky trunk of an arbutus tree.