AS  A YOUNG LAD I regularly visited an elderly lady who still preferred to use the (pre-North Sea) gas lights in her house and boiled Camp coffee in a jug perched on her black-leaded kitchen range, complete with pointed lace-cloth on the mantelshelf. Lilian had been my (not altogether very willing) mother’s piano teacher and had, in earlier, stricter days, not been at all averse to rapping idle piano students over the fingers with a 12″ ruler. She’d softened with age. With toothless smile she would watch me enthralled by her “Mira” playing Ave Maria. I never did care very much for the Camp coffee but I went on visiting Lilian Annie until her death well into her late nineties. And I can see her smile, hear the hiss of gas, and Ave Maria touches me again over a broadband connection that would have left her dumbstruck.