For a long time I would hardly have dared agree that my father and I had anything in common.

And yet one of the unlikely features of the eclectic bookshelves at home was a large collection of Aldous Huxley. Several rows of Chatto and Windus hardbacks, filled out with one or two older editions and a few paperbacks of some later works including Doors of Perception and Island. I must have started with Brave New World but when I ventured further afield I must have been a little surprised as I was introduced to anarchism, Buddhism and the possibilities of psychoactive drugs, none of which have I ever associated with my dad.

He must have first read them in his early twenties. Over the years, I’ve asked him several times what attracted him to Huxley. After all, no other author is so generously represented in his library. And he does seem an odd choice for someone with a strong patriarchal disciplinarian streak. But he could never answer. He’d just fob me off with a shrug and change the subject.

Recently he has re-read them. Now in his late eighties, he is still within Huxley’s spell. He still can’t say why, although he did say that while he enjoyed the books while he read them, he soon forgot almost everything about them, as if they are a special place, safely adrift from the rest of his life, where alternative passions can thrive a while without guilt.

But then he stops. There is something. And before long he is talking about the title essay in Music at Night. Huxley is listening to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis on record. ‘It would have been a ’78’ then, of course. And when the piece finishes, he has this lovely way of describing it.’ And my dad quotes from memory, word perfect:

With a stupid insect-like insistence, a steel point rasps and rasps the silence.

‘All those ‘s’s,’ he says. ‘It’s almost onomatopoeic, isn’t it?’ And he repeats the line, cherishing every syllable, momentarily lost in deep appreciation.

It then struck me that at the core of my dad’s love of classical music – he’s an obsessive collector and cataloguer of recordings, many of them taken from the radio – is not, perhaps, the music itself: the composition or the performance. What absorbs him most are the – largely domestic – rituals of listening. Maybe this is why he finds so precious those moments of transition, that take him away or (in this case) back to the world he has absented himself from.

Whatever the reason, we now share a favourite sentence.