Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place.

These lines came from observations of my children daydreaming. I’m always fascinated to witness this evidence of their inner likes, the workings of their imagination; I love to see them drift away from the quotidian world around them to a place all of their own. It’s such a crucial part of childhood – that other, parallel world. Adulthood, too, actually. We all need time for our brains to switch off, to go into a low gear.