This might sound strange but I always worry about seeing things I love in the spotlight, because I worry they won’t be taken seriously and all the feelings I have for them will be undermined. I don’t like exposing a vulnerable side of myself to potential ridicule, basically. I’ve had enough of that from the “oh that’s unusual” remarks people have made about my job over the years. So I worried, visiting the new fantasy exhibition at the British Library – Fantasy: Realms of the Imagination it’s called – about how fantasy would come across.
I love fantasy, you see. I’ve loved it ever since I was little and I read a story about a boy who discovered a city at the bottom of a lake. He’d been hearing it call to him in his sleep or something, and one day he dived and found it. And people were living there! Everything about this took me by surprise. I didn’t know books could do that, veer off from reality like that. I can almost feel my mind stretching to take it all in still. And that book, it fired something within me that remained ever since.
But fantasy has always been a relatively private thing for me, because growing up, I didn’t really know anyone else who was into it. My family wasn’t. OK, granted, I had my dad’s Hobbit book and his The Lord of the Rings, but I’d never seen him go anywhere near them, nor near any other kind of fantasy. He read biographies. And my friends weren’t into fantasy, despite my best efforts. Even when I joined Eurogamer many years ago, there was no one interested in it, though that’s changed now. So I learnt to keep it to myself. I kept it secret, kept it safe.
