Wasn’t it just. If I may break one of my rules again here: I used to sell him video cassettes. He seemed like a nice guy.

The shop manager had a favourite saying about the flow of customers, which he acknowledged as being from Herriott: “They come in rushes, like a pig peeing.” We sold electricals and electronics. This being about 1977, we were the nearest place in 30 miles that a lately successful millionaire could go to find fancy upmarket kit like video cassette recorders and the tapes to use on them. So about once a month, on a Thursday morning, he would appear at the counter and try to buy five or ten 60-minute tapes. These were the top-price items, better value but even more expensive than the 30- or 45-minute ones, and we didn’t always have in stock exactly what he asked for. But he’d take what we had, always careful to get the right kind of receipt so that his accountant could claim back the tax.

Of course, the first time, nobody told me. “You know who that was?” somebody asked. “Yes,” I remembered from writing it on the receipt, “he was a Mr J. A. Wight, from Thirsk.” Then they told me, and after that I started to take notice.

He had an unworldly air, understandable for someone who’d spent half his life talking to farmers or with his arm in a cow. His wife, smiling in the background, seemed more down-to-earth and very happy (memory says she looked like the girl who was playing her on TV at the time. I could be imagining that).

As I’ve said,coincidentally, very recently, elsewhere (and if you’ll forgive that shameless piece of self-promotion): Fiction is real. I don’t know that I ever actually read any of the Herriott books. Good characterisation, tales rooted in reality? He was doing all the right things.