The question I am asked most often is: How come you have read so many books? I'm a mature adult and I take no offence at this third degree. Instead I say: ‘Weddings'. Or, ‘shopping'. Or, ‘catching a flight'. Or, ‘movies'. Actually, it's all of the above, since they mean the same thing. Let me explain.

I am one of those human beings blessed with an exaggerated sense of the speed at which time flows. In other words, I refuse to believe that there are two whole hours between, say, 4.00 and 6.00. Somehow I have got it into my head that there are just 15 minutes between them.

The result is that I arrive for a wedding some four hours in advance or for a flight a day early. And with so much time on my hands, rather than try and save the world as Superman would do or bring world peace as Henry Kissinger might, I simply read. I take out the latest thriller from Charles Dickens or a best-seller from Leo Tolstoy and immerse myself in it.

This is wonderful because my wife occupies the other end of the scale, which explains the balance between us.

In her world, there are four hours between 4.00 and 6.00, and she prefers to arrive at the airport just in time to leap into the aircraft as it is about to shut its door. On such occasions, while I try to disengage my heart, which is usually at the roof of my mouth, my wife has the look of someone who has been forced to get into the aircraft a day in advance.

Attending weddings is the most traumatic of all. I was once so early that the bride was yet to arrive in the city. This, I keep telling anybody willing to listen (or, in this case, read), is better than getting there a few days after the first child is born, which is when we would arrive at the wedding if we followed my wife's technique.

I read while shopping, I read because movies, concerts, plays and football matches usually begin just three hours after I have got into the venue and I read because it is a good way to ignore the psychological profiling that goes on when I force my wife to march to the beat of my time.

Reams have been written about the latecomer. But except for the bird that gets in early to grab its worm (which was either late from the previous night or arrived earlier that morning), there is little about the earlycomer.

No matter, though. Tolstoy would approve, and that's good enough for me.