Dan Jenkins

When you're a fledgling youth-type adult, it appears that all people in their 40s look old enough to be in a painting hanging on the wall of a stately home in England. It's not until you limp into your 70s that people in their 40s look too young to vote, and college cheerleaders closely resemble Yorkshire terriers.

For a boy of ten, used to the coal bings and rust-coloured burns of Cowdenbeath, the fields and woodland of Kingswood, with its overgrown but stately avenue of copper-barked sequoias, felt like a local version of paradise.