I read this thirty or so years ago when I was seventeen and it was only seven years since I had moved with my family from a rural Oxfordshire village to a nearby town. Without remembering what the book was about I remember loving it, and finding in so many familiar things about village life.

And having just re-read it, I still got that delicious feeling of a tight-knit community, English eccentrics and the countryside which was all mine to explore. Of course the reality probably wasn't so idyllic for me or for Laurie Lee, but that's fine.

The book is a prose-poem about a life that's gone, full of sweet nostalgia. I loved it this time around as much as the last.