“I have often seen the film of my first birthday party; which shows me sitting like a puffed up pigeon chick in the white frilly plumage of my party dress, sitting on a rug on the small but neatly trimmed rear garden lawn with my parents and aunts gathered round me in a circle. My cousin, another squab, sits with me cushioned on the rug. But I feel no affinity with, or memory of the creature that blows out its solitary candle on the cake. I am the child’s stranger, and I have little feeling for it. I see it plump as it reaches out to push its finger into the eye of its cousin who sits beside it...”

A highly amusing memoir from a newly published author, Invisible Pleasures beautifully and vividly describes his life from the first tremors of his imagination as a child, through his early memories in the War, to the wild youthful Rabelaisian excitement of the 60s in London and his subsequent working in Borneo and Malaya as an architect.

It is an unrequited love story and a travelogue through parts of the ‘pre-globalised world’ where many places on the map then, before mass tourism had sucked them dry of mystery, were yet to be visited.

And it asks the question of what we are and where we come from in either God’s World or the Universe of Science.

Everywhere there were places to discover and exiting tales to be told...

This exciting memoir of love affairs and overseas adventures will appeal to those with an interest in the arts and foreign travel.

R. Pollard currently lives in Cambridge.