This Christmas hols, as that word suggests, I’ve been rereading mid-century children’s classics. Ones in which the characters go to another world.

Actually, I’ve been listening to them. Neither of my kids are the kind of reader I was—too well-adjusted I hope, certainly too busy outdoors whilst we were weather-bound inside on the other side of the world. By the time they read like I did, if they do, they may well be too old for the stories that formed writer-me. So I’ve turned to audiobooks, and that nothingless stretch of freeway on the long drive from town to the beach already seems like the perfect backdrop.