Suffused with optimism, I recognised I’d always been too self-involved to absorb the world around me, or to appreciate its entirety. I’d never taken pleasure from simple delights like picking raspberries from roadside bushes, eating apples from orchards or drinking fresh water from brooks. But modern life wasn’t like the Mark Twain novels I’d read as a boy. Pollution had embittered the taste of the raspberries, the apples were sour and water doesn’t really taste like water unless it’s mixed with fluoride and flows from a tap.
