Long life | 10 March 2016

I used to enjoy the ghost stories of M.R. James, but I’ve never actually seen a ghost or even believed that ghosts existed. I have visited many allegedly haunted houses in my life but no scary apparition has ever crossed my path. The old house in which my grandparents lived in Lanarkshire was such a place (its ghost, like so many others around Britain, was supposed to be a ‘grey lady’), but I stayed there year after year untroubled by spirits, though the portraits of my puritan Scottish ancestors were sometimes frightening enough. I have always thought that people who claimed to see ghosts suffered from hallucinations or had especially sensitive peripheral vision.

However, I feel sure that my tenant in Northamptonshire, the man who rents the Coach House at Stoke Park near Towcester where I live, has no such illusions. He is no impressionable dreamer but a down-to-earth businessman with interests in the United States and Australia as well as Britain.