Winter light, over and over.

Read aloud, in a cold kitchen, in January, which is the only way I have ever managed it. Silently on the page it slides off me; out loud it holds.

Burnt Norton I still find airless. The rose garden, the drained pool, the children in the leaves, all of it beautiful, and I have never once believed there was a person in it. East Coker is where he arrives. Little Gidding is where he stops pretending he isn't frightened.

The lines everybody quotes are the ones I like least, if I'm honest about it. The famous formulations have been rubbed smooth by handling. What I want from it is the plainer stuff: the dancers under the earth, the old men who ought to be explorers, the sea's many voices, the ash on an old man's sleeve. And the dead patrol in the second section of Little Gidding, which is the passage of his I would keep if I could only keep one.

He is often insufferable. There are stretches of instruction where I put it down and go and do something else for a day and come back less annoyed.

But three or four times a year, generally in bad weather, nothing else will do at all. I have the Faber paperback with the pale cover and it's coming apart at the staples. I'll replace it eventually, and I'll be sorry about the new one.