I have doubled the number of Glaswegian’s in my life, and find myself tempted, without thinking, to mimick their lovely way of putting a sentence around. So I will give in, this once, and say, inauthentically, “that’s me,back from my holidays”. Tomorrow, some of my amatuerish snaps of the South of France, but today I have to share my holiday reading.

What to Look for in Winter is novelist Candia McWilliam’s memoir about, among other things, losing her sight. It’s an extraordinary book for many, very emotional reasons, but her love of buildings, houses, homes and the details of objects and ritual that make them up are unmissable.

Paul Rafferty, 33 Tite Street

Above a painting of her flat, once the studio of John Singer Sargent, which she moved to when losing her sight. She writes: “[The] windows face north and south, twenty feet of sheer light, with muslin soothing or baffling the light over the street-side window. It is not possible to be in this room and not feel better. It is exhilarating and feels full of the ghosts of work.”

During her life Candia has lived and stayed in many extraordinary houses. Her father worked passionately to save historical houses of Scotland, and her descriptions of a friend’s Regency homes on the Isle of Colonsay, or a flat in Grade I listed Wotton House (above) shine with an inherited passion.

It’s all a delight, though not all the houses are grand, and she is terrific on the pleasures of clean towels and soap, all that stuff. She claims too that striving for domestic perfection stifled her marriage, so watch out, homemakers. Here is one last bit, of a large house cut into flats.

“Voices through pipes make of the largest house a shared familial linked system, those rooms connected by the web of piping… Water is making comment through the pipes of the old house.” How lovely.