Fay Weldon is describing heaven for me, drawing not on that powerful, sometimes unruly but always compelling imagination that has made her for the past half century one of our leading novelists, but rather on personal experience. Recently, under anaesthetic in hospital following heart problems, she felt herself almost literally being torn between life and death.

“It was quite vivid. There were people in these green things, who were no doubt medical people, pulling me one way. And then there was this strange creature, like Cerberus, with lots of legs and arms, trying to pull me the other way, ” she says. In other words, towards the gates to the next life.