I don’t think it matters what gets you into something. For instance, I may not be a classical music buff but I am deeply fond of Mahler’s Fifth and I can trace that back to Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson.

You may know it better as Somewhere in Time, the film version which Matheson also wrote, and which starred Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve. For the film, Mahler was out and for some reason Rachmaninoff was in.

Okay.

I have to be in just the right mood for the film version — though plenty of other people will always love it, and some of them dress up in costumes at the filming location every year.

Right mood or not, film or book, I will always and forever be impressed with how Matheson pulls off the meeting between Richard and Elise. I suppose now it’s a meet-cute, but in the 1970s when the book was written and the – I think – 1980s when the film was made, it was just really clever. A hat’s off moment.

Anyway.

The book has a ferocity to it that the film, for all its charm, does not. Richard is ill and there’s a frenzied delirium on the page that’s so compelling. It feels like Rachmaninoff’s little Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is too light for the book.

So I listened to some Mahler after so enjoying the book. Some years later when I left a magazine to go freelance, I was given a CD of his First and Firth Symphonies. I think it was by a Polish orchestra, I’m not sure anymore.

But I am sure that the very next day, my first-ever day as a self-employed writer in my home office, I put that CD on.

Instantly, the phone rang. For some reason, though, I didn’t stop the CD, I just turned the volume down, down, so low down that it might as well have been off. But since it wasn’t, it of course carried on playing.

And carried on. And carried on.

For that entire first day of freelance life, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony played on a barely audible loop, working its way into my head and – actually – leaving me miserable. At this distance I’ve forgotten the details of the day so maybe I was just becoming conscious of what a big step I’d taken leaving a magazine and a salary.

But I think it was the music.

The other day, I had to write about the launch of Apple Music Classical, so naturally I listened to it. So naturally I listened to Mahler’s Fifth first.

Fifth first. There’s something wrong with that sentence.

The thing about Apple Music Classical is that it’s supposed to be incredibly good at helping you find what classical music you want. I believe that’s true, you can search by what instruments you like, you can search by record label recording number, and everything in between. But you have to know something and apparently “Mahler Poland” isn’t enough to get back that old CD.

So naturally, since I live in Birmingham in England, I listened to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The world-class CBSO.

And at moments this music was exultant, and at moments this music scuttled me.

I was standing in my kitchen, cooking, and shocked how miserable I got. It was wonderful.