I'm going to be incredibly self-indulgent and navel-gazey for a bit. I do hope you don't mind. You see the thing is I have this relationship. It's long-standing, it's shaped the man I am today, from my sense of humour to my morality, to my job. It's touched me deeply and it's tinged with bittersweetness. And it's with a man I've never met and who has no idea I exist.

You see today is the anniversary of The People's Revolution of the Glorious 25th of May. For some of you, that might immediately set off a few buzzing lights in your head. For the rest of you, it's a Terry Pratchett thing.

I can still remember the exact point and circumstances in which I received my first Terry Pratchett book. I was 11 and I had just left my primary school a year early as my parents had decided to move down to a nicer area in South London. Mainly for me and my brother so we could have a better education as the local prospects were, quite frankly, fucking dire. I had just finished my last day at my warm, familiar primary school where all the teachers knew who I was and liked me and it was small enough for you to conceivably know everyone there and I was moving to this great big imposing scary place where there was more than one class per year. My word! Imagine that! So I've walked out of school for the last time and I get into my dad's car (a Nissan Prarie we called Bessie, after the orange VW van my parents used to own when we were much younger that I barely just recall). I'm sat in the backseat waiting for my little brother to come out, legs kicking back and forth against the seat, and my mum passes me back a book that she's bought for me. No special reason, just because. She was the kind of mum who did that because she wanted to encourage you to read. It was The Colour of Magic, I had never heard of it before and I have no idea why my mum picked it. I remember that old Josh Kirby cover looking weird. Everyone looked so strangely lumpy and unsettling.

I didn't read it, I devoured it. I don't recall ever reading a book so (relatively for the other books I was reading) dense so voraciously. Even though now I don't even think that much of the book these days (early Discworld, in my opinion, doesn't hold a candle to the later stuff) it was a world of such strange wonder and irreverance. It was simultaneously affably dismissive of the prosaic 'fantasy' to be found elsewhere whilst being capable of incredible flights of imagination, with one portion of the book being set on an upside-down mountain set on a flat, disc-shaped world borne through space on the backs of 4 enormous elephants standing on the shell of an even more improbably enormous turtle. And it was all so incredibly, so utterly, so very English.

My mum finished the book right after me. I still wonder if she didn't actually buy it for herself and then assuaged her guilt by getting me to read it. And then she bought the next one. And the next. And the next. We carried on like that for years. Buying them as soon as the paperback came out, me reading it, then her, then asking what we each thought of this one, and was it as good as the last? At some point (I think it was around Lords and Ladies) we got too impatient to wait for the paperbacks anymore and before you knew it, we were buying them the very day they were released.

It was about the same time that my mum started remarking how very 'Pratchett' my sense of humour was and I started to realise how much I'd shaped myself around the books. There was something in them that sang to me. Not the plots or the characters or the puns or the gentle playing with language, but something underneath that. A pure, throbbing sense of humanity. For all it's sense of slightly exhausted cynicism, there was always that little glittering sparkle of faith and love for humanity underneath. It's probably for this reason that my favourite character is Sam Vimes, of the City Watch books. So much of his character revolves around the fact that he sees some of the very worst of humanity and he knows how incredibly easy it would be to cast aside all the restraints humanity places on itself and submit to pure Id, but also how very important it is that we don't. Pratchett writes about how vital it is that we all show some decency to each other, to put aside simple hate, whilst acknowledging just how easy and tempting it is to rail and scream and lash out at the world. It's something that I feel like I get.

Plus there's the obvious one. The Librarian. I'm not going to say he's the reason I started working in a library, but he certainly gave the whole affair a certain cachet. It was a lot easier working at a library knowing that some people out there saw a library, not as a dusty building full of books, but a mysterious portal to a strange world of dangerous knowledge. It imparted a somewhat grand sense of romanticism to the whole affair. and the knowledge that a whole bunch of people out there started wearing badges saying 'Librarians Rule Ook' fair warmed the cockles.

When I found out that Terry Pratchett had been diagnosed with Alzheimers it felt like being kicked in the gut. It was this horrible and sudden knowledge that some day this lifelong relationship, carried out anonymously and long-distance via a purchase at Waterstone's every 18 months or so, was someday going to end. It was like finding out about death all over again. And at the same time I felt so guilty. I don't know the man, why should I feel so bad?

But in a way, I feel like I do. I have an enormous sense of affection to him. Maybe I'm projecting what I see in the books onto him, but he feels like some of the best humanity has to offer. Quietly humble and decent. Softly-spoken but firm of mind. For God's sakes, when he was knighted he made himself a sword of meteoric iron. How damn cool is that? I can't help but feel that soon I'm going to find out that he's passed on, or he'll finally win his battle to one day legally end his own life with dignity, and the world is going to be a poorer place. But either way, he still leaves behind a legacy of around 40 books, with God knows how many spin-offs and side projects and all the rest. Books that I can almost chart my life by, a lifeline reaching back through my own adolescence.

I just wish it didn't have to end.

But therein lies the embuggerance.