My world is mourning the loss of Terry Pratchett. I heard, via a text from a friend, in the most incongruous place of all, a Tesco carpark, that he was gone. And my heart sank.

It’s one thing to know he was ill. That he’s gone is a whole other deal, and not one I’m happy to be accepting. But this is reality sometimes. It doesn’t do fairness, and it doesn’t do the things that make us happy all the time. But the world will never be without Terry Pratchett. He left a lot of himself scattered about the place.

The first Terry Pratchett book I read was Equal Rites, sent to me as a birthday present by a young man whom I haven’t seen in some years. We’re neither of us very young any more, but somehow that doesn’t matter. Equal Rites, I read, sitting on a brown carpet clad floor in a house in one of the less remote parts of France. The town even had a TGV station (after a certain amount of fighting with the SNCF) to bring all the summer tourists. And I laughed. And I cried. I read any number of books as the fit took me, but I had never read anything like this, never encountered a book which made me feel this happy, and to some extent, I never have since. It was the power of surprise.

Most of the obits that are starting to turn up will tell you that PTerry wrote 70 books. Someone who leaves that legacy may never be truly gone.