“Like a wound, we all carry within us an obsession with the period preceding the major events that mark our lives. It may be the time immediately before we were born: the hinterland, both familiar and mysterious, of our parents and the way life was then. It may be the encounter with a great figure of the past, a poet or visionary, who transforms our present and whose beginnings we seek to identify with. Or again, it may be a period that we ourselves have lived through, but that we relive differently, more meaningfully, through the vivid existence of something else.”

Michael Peppiatt, 1996.