We arrived in Brighton in May 2005 with two suitcases and no books. We travelled light – and 54 weeks later we returned light. Regular readers will recall that at the Dome and to my eternal shame I declined purchasing Love, Poverty and War by Christopher Hitchens and having it signed by the great man because, as I insisted to Suzi: "There’s no room in the case."

Anyway, there was a small library in one of our first temporary lodgings – at Cavendish Place – but the delightful little flat that became our Brighton home offered nothing in the way of reading matter.

In those pre-Kindle days – I’m still Kindle-less actually – we could either buy books or, something far more appealing to canny Scots, borrow them. The Jubilee Library hadn’t been long open I think and it was too airy and bright and hi-tech to visit only once.

With it being outside the Zimmer Zone we should have done just that, but we cheated!

There we were, in Brighton for the first and last time and on a repetition-avoidance kick, and selling-out for a score of books. At least we didn’t re-read any of them, but we have to confess to authorial repetition.

Suzi got hooked on Dickens and the Poldark novels. Me on Maigret. I couldn’t get enough of Georges Simenon’s tales of his Parisian detective, but better than any of them was his non-Maigret novel, The Stain in the Snow. Check-out the online library catalogue. The review should whet your appetite.

In addition to our day time trips to the Jubilee we popped along one evening in the spring of 2006 for a quiz night, and were teamed-up with three women. We didn’t win a prize – books, naturally, not beer – but I excelled myself, if only once. (Well, if you eschew repetition you don’t want to overdo it.)

Just before the interval, the assembled half a dozen teams were given a question to ponder over during the break: which novel begins: "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."? It rang a distant bell with me and as everyone else rose for a repast of sparkling wine and nibbles, I toddled downstairs to another room, where the answer came to me.

When the quiz resumed and we were asked which novel again, I winked at Suzi. My hand was the only one held aloft. She was deeply impressed. "Lady Chatterley’s Lover," I said.

I’d first become aware of the book as a schoolboy in 1960, the year of the sensational trial at the Old Bailey. When I was sixteen, and by then an office boy, I found it secreted away in a desk in the production planning department of a Scottish textile mill. That’s where I read it, the first sentence and then the entire work, intermittently, over a long, hot summer. It wasn’t easy avoiding the attention of the boss and then, as I read more of the text and its scenes filled my mind, another obstacle increasingly impeded my progress: the sight of the office girls. But by a supreme effort of will, I overcame this distraction and made it to the end – but had to wait 40 years for my endeavours to be rewarded with un point in a far-away library.

Remembering Lady C has conjured up another, innocent distraction you might fancy too: can you remember where you were when you read the first sentence of a memorable novel? At work, at play, alone or in company, at home or abroad? Go for it! You’ll find it’s like Proust’s madeleine.

My mind is in 1965, and I’m thinking about more than spinning, combing and fancy twisting! When I’ve exhausted that memory trip I’ll try another first sentence. Maybe, "Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him." Or then again, I might take up Suzi’s suggestion, "It dawned on him while driving to work that he had semtex in his brain." What a whizz-kid she is!

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