Friday afternoon. You’re home from school. No homework, or maybe only math, and who cares about math because long division is dumb. Mum makes you some crumpets and you watch All Creatures Great and Small, the one where an old dog dies peacefully and someone in a tweed jacket smokes a cigar. Then Dad gets home from work and it’s on! (In case you’re wondering, your dad spent the day designing a new lamb deboning machine; you grew up in New Zealand and this is how all New Zealand dads spend their days.)

You gather up a week’s worth of books—a backpack full of Maeve Binchys and James Micheners and ghost stories—and head out to the trike. Ah, the trike! That’s it in the photo, the three-wheeled beast your dad built. You sit in the middle, hoping no one will see you. You drive through the streets of Hamilton and people point at you and stare. What an odd sight, a family of foolishly tall people on a clattering buggy! A dad with a crazy beard, a kid with crazy hair, a mum with a massive bag of books strapped to her back.

The library is the only nice building in all of Hamilton. It’s a massive old concrete edifice in a town where everything else is made of glass or painted brown or designed to look like a Soviet vending machine. (Naturally, they pulled it down when you were in high school and replaced it with the blue building pictured below. The new library was designed to look like a casino or the set of a German TV game show; it was hoped that stupid people would enter it by accident and then find themselves reading a book.) You have been inside every room of the old library a million times. The smell of the Young Adult reading room—socks, books, a hint of Impulse body spray—is as familiar to you as the smell of your own hand. You know all the librarians and they all know you. There’s the nice old lady librarian who keeps getting older and older and her face has so many lines on it and every week you expect her to be dead and you wonder if that will be upsetting or just, you know, a thing that happened. And there’s the young man librarian with the very high voice; you feel a little sorry for him, though he always seems cheerful. (If he was 25 when you were 10, he is now in his fifties. How can this be?) The nice old lady librarian once told you that you were the youngest person ever to be issued a library card: your parents signed you up when you were just a few weeks old. Hearing that made you feel really proud.

You all disperse, mum to the violent murder mysteries, dad to the Things With Wheels section, you to your usual spots: first, the YA room for a few novels (you like the ones about English boarding schools and ballerinas with eating disorders); then to the Paranormal section; and finally to the piles of magazines, where, if no one is looking, you’ll open the Ladies’ Home Journal and read “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”

You meet back at the front desk to check out your books. The nice old lady librarian asks you about school and you say something polite but odd. Our class got an axolotl. It smells bad. You’re allowed to check out as many books as you want; you usually take as many as you can fit in the backpack—ten, fifteen. And then it’s time for dinner at P&M Plaza, a peculiar shopping mall in which the cafeteria—orange and green carpet; cheese and onion sandwiches; rugby on the TV—is for some reason in the middle of the wedding dress department. You eat your hard-boiled egg and soggy chips surrounded by polyester gowns. You want to get started on Mysteries of Britain, but your mum says “Not while you’re eating,” which is totally unfair because your dad is watching the rugby and how is that any less rude? And then back to the trike. Fifteen minutes of humiliation and you’re home.

Home is the best bit. You sit on the sofa with the Spaniel and sort your books into three piles: must read; might read; upon further reflection, nah. Once you’ve got your piles worked out, you crack open Mysteries of Britain and turn to the chapter on spooky animals. Some of the pages have those weird brown stains, a dirty smear that is definitely either chocolate or old blood. It doesn’t bother you. Your dad watches the end of the rugby match. Go Gary, you little beauty! Your mum passes you two squares of Milky Bar. You’re all warm and safe indoors, and somewhere out there on a Yorkshire moor an unlucky English gentleman is encountering a phantom black dog.