In a series of twenty-four letters Michael Mayne makes an offering to his grandchildren of all that has inspired him in literature, music and art. It is, in Ronald Blythe's words 'an inventory of his joy'.

Written in a candid autobiographical fashion, the book is a passionate plea to the reader to pass through their one earthly life with a trained and watching eye.

It is a confession of how he came to unify his outer and inner worlds, the ordinariness and yet the extraordinariness of everything...

'This keenly argued book confronts today's fashionable cynicism and despair, and thus has a message for the current moment when the experience of ageing, or the environment, or of those complex skills and emotions which go into the creation of poetry or stories or music, are all distorted or ignored in favour of what is called "reality", but where the highest thought and achievement are concerned, is not at all real.' Ronald Blythe, from the Foreword