Recent home renovations have resulted in a very messy basement, and last weekend his nibs and I began trying to whip it into shape. On dusty shelves at the back skulk books on death row – a mere judgement away from the re-cycling bucket, their stringy spines saved only by nostalgia – tatty thrillers, out of date guidebooks, bargain basement glossies. One of the grubbiest of all is a Thomas Cooke European railway timetable from July 1988, whose yellowed pages and miniscule type once saved his nibs and I from crashing homeless with our backpacks on the floor of Paris’s Gare du Nord by informing us of the sleeper train to Rome.