The passage I chose to hand him, from the essay 'Of Solitude', concerned Montaigne's secret to happiness. It says, simply: these are the things we normally think will bring happiness; they're wrong, here's mine. 'We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can,' he writes; 'but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them.' In what's become something of a trademark for his life philosophy he adds: 'We must reserve a back shop all our own.' A back shop - or in the original French, arriere-boutique . Of course, this is metaphor. Of course, my dad took it literally.