I had no idea what would be really offensive to my parents and what wasn't. So I was, what? I suppose 13 or 14, well, when I first read Origin of Species, I knew that was... that had to be read underneath the covers and shoved under the pillow with a torch at night. But oh yes, I must have been a bit older, because War and Peace I read up on the Wiltshire Downs, and I had a 150 BSA Bantam, so I must have been 16, then. Pop-pop, two stroke, and kept the books hidden in the saddlebag. So imagine the power that still lives with me of reading Tolstoy on the Wiltshire Downs, when you thought that if anybody found you reading this thing, that would be... I don't know, caught with the worst sort of porn or something.

It made it all really vivid and here's the copy. Now that, you see, that is the sort of thing that you'd have in the fetish room. But just recently, this great honour, I mean to me, it's like winning a Nobel Prize or something. It just couldn't be better. A Nobel Prize could hardly touch it. But imagine the Penguin, or Publisher of the Year, or something of the kind, anyway, they were celebrating their 60^th or 70^th anniversary, and they took 50 books, I think, maybe. And one of them... one of them was Congo Journey, in the same format. Now that, you know... lots of stripy penguins in the fetish room, but to have one made in reality is just ridiculous pleasure.