Catmachine

We have already seen how - somewhere deep in my childhood - I developed an obsession with the Post Office Tower - or rather, as I discovered - Post Office Towers. I also liked encyclopedias of various types and was always disappointed that you couldn't take them out of the library. I had to make do with the ones I received for Christmas or birthday, but a lot of the time that was enough for me. Many was the evening I would spend poring over The Wonder Book of Do You Know or T he Guinness Book of Records . And it was thanks to this that I discovered that there were other towers in the world, some of them taller than the Post Office Tower. At first this made me feel irritated and inferior - I felt proprietorial about the tower I saw on a regular basis and the criticism implicit in the fact that the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building were taller upset me. But then I began to obsess about these towers themselves, drawing pictures of them, building replicas of them out o