Lord of the things.

I don’t like exposing a vulnerable side of myself to potential ridicule, basically.

I love fantasy, you see.

Black and white line-work artwork commissioned for the British Library’s Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition. It shows a mountain of, well, things, really, all inspired by popular fantasy. There’s No-face from Spirited Away, there’s a castle, there’s a knight. It’s a dense picture of many inspirations.

I didn’t know books could do that, veer off from reality like that.

I can almost feel my mind stretching to take it all in still.

And that book, it fired something within me that remained ever since.

A photograph showing a notebook and two pencil sketched pictures in an exhibition. These are made by Ursula le Guin, the legendary sci-fi and fantasy author, and helped her shape her Earthsea stories.

My family wasn’t.

And my friends weren’t into fantasy, despite my best efforts.

So I learnt to keep it to myself.

A photograph of a piece of paper with some annotated circles scribbled on it. This was drawn by author Susannah Clarke as she tried to figure out the movement of the tides in her wonderful book Piranesi. But there are crossings out, and figurings-out. It’s an informal glimpse into her mind.

I kept it secret, kept it safe.

It’s the silly stories Bertie likes.

Who’s going to see a silly thing like that?'

A look inside a giant sketchbook by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. These are his Carceri sketchings showing, in charcoal on paper, a huge, multi-layered, multi-arched, and impossible - architecturally speaking - interior scene.

Imagine my face when I walk into the exhibition, then, and there are many other people there.

It’s really popular.

And that’s when the first wave of realisation hits me: thisisa proper exhibition about a proper thing.

A photograph of an original Monty Python and the Holy Grail script, on display in the British Library. It’s pretty unspectacular. It’s in a kind of ring-bound and lined A4 notepad, and it’s filled with notes and scribbles going off in all different directions. I bet there are some good jokes in there somewhere.

The second wave of realisation comes when I start combing through the exhibits.

The exhibition is broken up into a few sections ordered by fantasy types.

And what strikes me first about Fairy and Folk Tales are the dates I see.

A small book with many lines of tiny, neat handwriting in it. It belonged to Charlotte Brontë and it contains her Glass Town: The Search after Happiness story.

Kirk wrote that in the 17th century.

Around the corner, there’s even a crumbling 14th century edition of Homer’s Iliad.

So It’s not just me and it’s not just now - people have been into fantasy forever.

These things are thousands of years old.

And that’s really exciting.

But why - what is it about fantasy we keep turning to?

Well, I have a few theories of my own.

One, it’s quite exciting and it’s nice to escape to a fantasy world.

This is true of games too, I think.

I often wonder what effect morality has had on our minds because of the games we’ve played.

Although, didn’t I solve a lot of them with violence?

Bad example Bertie, move on.

But speaking of games, something else I worried about, going into the exhibition, was gate-keeping.

But fair play to the curators because it didn’t.

Clearly books are the stars.

But they’re not all that’s here.

There are games; and I don’t just mean one token game, I mean many games.

I almost blunder into their conversation in loud agreement, but decide against it because this is alibraryafter all.

But I feel very seen.

I feel like I belong.

It’s totally unremarkable, if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

I’ve got a shadowy monster tattooed on my arm in partial reference to it.

But this notebook is again, totally unremarkable - it could be one of mine.

And that makes it so much more approachable.

In it I see le Guin forming an idea, quizzing herself and honing, honing.

It’s tremendously humanising.

And I do mean scruffy - I don’t know they deciphered it.

But this is imagination slapped down on paper as it erupts.

I’m glimpsing the rough formation of stars.

Sothat’swhere her idea came from.

It must be what he was inspired by.

These little revelations fizz and pop as I turn every corner of the exhibition.

But then I don’t think it was ever designed to include everything, because how could it?

Perhaps I will no longer keep my love of it to myself.

Fantasy: Realms of the Imagination runs until 25th February 2024.