The lower slopes, obviously. The distributors, the rights owners, the media owners, the cinema chains – cogs, small wheels, but people who nonetheless sometimes, despite all odds, know a little of the history of the industry they work in. Then there are the institutions. Your BFIs and your MOMIs; and there are also lots of other little museums and collections, either privately owned or attached to universities and colleges. The Bill Douglas Centre For the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, for instance, with its 18,000 books on cinema-related topics; 5000 periodicals, ranging from fan magazines to scholarly journals; 4000 postcards, including images of stars, studios and cinema buildings; 4000 still photographs of stars; 3000 items of sheet music related to films; 2500 programmes from film festivals and premieres; 2200 cigarette cards; 500 records; 1400 items of press and publicity material; plus stereocards, stereotransparencies, toys, jigsaws, games, handbills, posters, greetings cards, letters, magic lanterns, magic lantern slides, zoetropes and praxinoscopes.

   And in exactly the same way as I had been pestering people with a request that was just a little bit left field, a little bit outside their ken, on the periphery of their vision, so I too started to attract unsolicited attention. Your name gets out and about. Someone, for instance, contacted me about their desire to find a permanent institutional home for their collection of cinema-related ashtrays. Could I pass on their details to any relevant parties?

   Now and then I'm also invited to help or join or publicise campaigns to save old cinema buildings (like the art deco ABC Cinema on Whiteladies Road, Bristol, dating from 1921) facing the threat of redevelopment or demolition.

   And then of course there are the traders – people with shops, people in the mail order world. Mavens, marketmakers, facilitators, connectors, salesmen. People in the optics business (selling, say, telescopes but also projectors and cameras and therefore all sorts of celluloid related products and peripherals), people in the consumer electronics trade, people in the memorabilia and antiques and collectibles business. And whole hordes of archivists, both professional and amateur. Maybe I’d become – in my own modest way – a collector of these people. Or even better still, I’d been collected up by them.

   They were reinventing me, placing me in a parallel universe, dropping me an email, say, reminding me of the time we got drunk together one evening at the Berlin Film Festival fifteen years ago, which is insane because I’ve never been to the Berlin Film Festival. I’ll shake my head and roll my eyes at this idiocy; but at the same time, something’s stirring in my imagination and I can see a cellar bar, a dank crypt, distempered brickwork and flagging floors, all nooks and crannies, with a battered old Weimar-era upright piano standing in a dingy corner, its varnish pitted with cigarette burns.

   Close my eyes and I’m almost there.

   Someone sits in at the piano and begins playing a half-familiar tune.

  And I think, well, so be it, another rabbit hole.