So: when one is impossibly tired, and life has its grim moments, nothing beats a little escapism. Some pick up Dirty Dancing and press play: nothing like the late loved lost Patrick Swayze to get Baby out of the corner….others head for that well thumbed volume on the shelf to read it yet again. It takes us back to those precious times when our Mums were telling us off for reading Enid Blyton under the covers.

I have always had a taste for the gothic. Bram Stoker and his Nosfiratu: The Woman In Black: all are favourites. But to escape there’s only one book that does the trick: and I find myself watching the television adaptation as I write this, just as captivated as ever. It is that mad-wife-in-the-attic classic, Jane Eyre.

There’s nothing like an authoritative man, as Darcy proved to us all so perfectly. But most of us are not averse to the odd fatal flaw. It is Mr Rochester that renders the story irresistible, a magnetic creative type trapped in the spider web of his own mistakes. A man so flawed he can dissemble his way right to the very altar; a tetchy svengali who can see into the very soul of the woman he loves. A wild hoseriding nobleman who falls for a humble governess. It’s hypnotic, it’s forbidden, it’s a heady cocktail of all that is dark and gothic. Who would not want a fiery missionary and a wealthy landowner fighting for their hand? Posh frocks and haunting mansions? Society and its underbelly?

But I am not Jane, and I don’t have a mansion. I’d like to think I have my own Mr Rochester, complete with moody creative swings and flaws, but I have yet to discover a wife in the loft. I think she might feel a bit cramped up there anyway.