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Perrott’s Folly, also known as The Monument, stood in open parkland when it was constructed in 1758, at the behest of a local man, John Perrott. Perrott was both wealthy and eccentric, a combination that seems to occur more frequently in the eighteenth century than in any other. Built in a Gothic style, designed by an unknown architect, the octagonal tower is of red brick and has six storeys, with the windows on each level in a different design. Unknown too is its original purpose. It was certainly a monument to status and possibly used as a hunting lodge. One tale has it as a vantage point for Perrott to view his wife’s grave, some fifteen miles away. As Edgbaston became absorbed into the sprawl of Birmingham, the parkland was covered in brick and stone, and the tower became hemmed in, to the point where it is now fenced into an absurdly small rectangle of grass, surrounded by later buildings.

Along with the nearby tower of the Edgbaston Waterworks, Perrott’s Folly is said to have inspired the Two Towers of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s parents were Brummies, and though he was born in South Africa, the family moved back to Birmingham when he was three years old. He lived in several houses in the city and its suburbs, including one in Edgbaston, until he went up to Oxford University.

As far as I know, the evidence for the Two Towers inspiration is circumstantial, and Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien has nothing to say on the subject. But on his way to and from school, the young Ronald Tolkien would have often looked up at those two towers silhouetted against the grey Edgbaston sky. Describing its creation, Tolkien said that The Lord of the Rings had grown ‘like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has been long forgotten, descending into the deeps’. These ‘said to have’ and ‘rumoured to have’ stories are often tenuous, but it doesn’t seem improbable that the two Edgbaston towers were crumbled into that leaf-mould.

Perrot’s Folly was used as an observatory during the nineteenth century and then began its gradual decline into near-collapse. The Birmingham Conservation Trust carried out emergency repairs in 2005, and the charity Trident Reach bought the tower in 2013 — for £1. The charity is aiming to raise a million quid to turn the place into an arts venue, an ambitious undertaking in the current economic climate. Unfortunately, the tower’s interior is in a poor state of repair, with one floor missing, and is rarely open to visitors.

As many of you will know, synchronicity is the term coined by Carl Jung to denote ‘the phenomenon of events which coincide in time and appear meaningfully related but have no discoverable causal connection’ (OED definition).

Jung’s best-known personal example happened when a patient described a dream in which she received a golden scarab. Jung heard a tapping sound at the window behind him. When he turned and opened the window, a scarabaeid beetle flew in. The creature wasn’t quite the golden scarab of the dream, but the coincidence was impressive.

Here’s an instance of synchronicity that occurred in my life recently that seemed both random and yet meaningful.

A few weeks ago, I was working on my new book, The World Unseen, published this month. I wrote a sentence that began, ‘Reece, conscious of his hatless, dishevelled appearance…’

That evening I picked up a book of HP Lovecraft stories I was reading and began a story I hadn’t read before, called ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’. Forty-five pages in, I read a sentence beginning, ‘While hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb…’

A coincidence? Certainly. But that coincidence seemed to me, and still seems, meaningful — an instance of synchronicity, in other words. I had struggled during that day’s writing session. The chapter I was working on was a climactic one, and I felt enmeshed in difficulties with it. But reading that line of Lovecraft’s, which echoed one of my own freshly minted sentences, heartened me. I’m not saying that I was communing with the spirit of old HP, let alone channelling him. But writing is a solitary pursuit, and at that moment, because he and I had chosen and conjoined the same words almost a century apart (Lovecraft wrote the story in 1934 and revised it for publication in 1935), I felt a strong sense of communion. For once I was not an imposter or a delusional loon, but part of a great and continuing tradition, a member of the centuries-old writers’ guild.

You’re a skinny kid from Brixton, but Bromley is your home now. Life in Bromley might as well be life on Mars, so far does it seem from the charms and thrills of London. But you’re going to get out, sooner than they think. You know you’ve got the ambition and the work ethic, though you worry, late at night, alone in your room, whether you’ve got the magic. You’re waiting for the gift of sound and vision. How do they do it, these geniuses like Little Richard and Anthony Newley? How do they come up with these three-minute songs that capture all the intensity and yearning and craziness of life? And how do they command the stage and the audience, like supermen — or madmen? It’s mysterious and frightening. Frightening, because there’s something inside you, gnawing away, a fear that you’ll never discover the secret, that you’ll never be the person you think you deserve to be. Not that you’d ever admit that to anyone.

This weekend it’s the PTA fete and almost everyone you know will be there. You and your friend George Underwood have joined a band called the Kon-Rads and you’re playing a set at the fete and they reckon a few thousand people will be there. There’ll be a stage on the playing fields and a brand-new sound system. You don’t really think much of the Kon-Rads, and George has made it clear to you he’s the singer, not you, but it’s better to be in a band than not, and you can play your sax and strike a few poses and maybe learn something from the others. You know the Kon-Rads aren’t going anywhere, but you’re sure — most of the time — that you are. Because how could the universe be so cruel as to implant this lust in you and then not let you consummate it?

In fact, it was George who joined the band first, and he invited you in, and this was typically generous of George, because only a few months before you’d double-crossed him over a girl. He told you he’d arranged a date with — what was her name? Carol? — and you wanted her yourself. So you told him she’d told you she wasn’t turning up for the date. Of course, she did, and then went home in tears when George didn’t show. He found out what you’d done and punched you in the face, which was most unlike George. Of course, you didn’t hit him back: not because you felt guilty but because you’re not much cop at punching anyone. And he didn’t mean to hit you in the eye, but he did and you almost went blind. George was full of remorse, still is. But now you’ve got an eye that looks a different colour from the other one, and you’re almost grateful to him for punching you because it makes you look strange and otherworldly, like an alien or a starman.

You think you look pretty cool with your quiff and your Grafton sax (OK, it’s plastic but you couldn’t afford anything else, and besides, a Grafton was good enough for Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman), but you’re worried that George will outshine you like he usually does. You’re worried that George has more talent than you, and he’s certainly more popular than you, but you know he doesn’t have more ambition than you. No one you’ve ever met has more ambition than you. Fame, what’s your name?