In the latest (and penultimate) instalment of Lighting out of Lockdown, I recall how my wife, Teri, who had long been denied a seaside stroll by an attack of sciatica, felt a two-hour outing in Worthing was “heaven”. And she’s well acquainted with paradise-on-earth. In 2014 she went with me in search of Shangri-La, the Himalayan utopia at the centre of James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon. The bookmark in my copy of the novel is an entry ticket for the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, one of the stops on our pilgrimage.

If you’ve missed the start of the story, you can find out more on an earlier post.