David Lovibond

I remember Wales: the early start from a sleeping Liverpool, the changes of trains and freezing waiting-rooms at polysyllabic stations, the endless trek across the permanent Sunday that was Anglesey in the 1950s. None of this was supposed to be fun. There were family connections stretching back over 100 years to a fiercely biblical great-grandfather, who had walked from Somerset to Amlwch for a job on the new railway. The austerity of the grey, disapproving little town must have suited; he married a Welsh monoglot, 'went chapel', and put down a taproot. It wasn't until my father escaped into schoolmastering and England that a chink of light was let in.

My parents died quickly and hygienically, without any sort of precursory illness. I have no siblings, aunts, uncles or cousins whose descent into sordid infirmity might have obliged me to visit them. I have a small platoon of children, it is true, but they all live with their mothers and have saved me from childhood mewlings and pubescent messiness. As a teenager and famed walker of hills, I piled humiliations on the heads of less robust friends, but at night I would steal across the fields in search of a private latrine pit. In my last summer before university I spent months hefting cast-iron dustbins full of wet ash for Liverpool Corporation, before heading off to Switzerland and attacking the Bernese Oberland like a hardened stormtrooper.

Like all junkies, my most important relationship is with my dealer. He must be cajoled and wheedled to remember me first, I must pay any price he asks and be grateful for the chance, and in no circumstances can there be the faintest whisper of complaint about the quality of the supply. To be sure, bibliomania is not a comfortable addiction. To feed my craving for modern first editions, including my beloved Williams and Jenningses, takes a fifth of my income - more than I spend on food or my children. I have lost entire weekends in a haze of book fairs and pilgrimages to remote bookshops (which typically prove to be closed).