Dylan Lauren

I am a picky eater. By that I mean, I love to pick the raisins out of oatmeal raisin cookies, the chips out of chocolate chip cookies, the white side off of black and white cookies, and the vanilla center out of Oreos.

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.

Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way.