I think it was in 2002 and I was invited by my brother to a private view at a smart London gallery. I found the exhibition uninspiring and was impatient to move on. While my brother was talking to the gallery-owner, I took my glass of champagne and wandered around the room, incredulous that people were prepared to pay for this stuff. Most of it was typical post Brit Art crap. Dull and ugly. As there was no sign of Tom breaking off his conversation, I headed down the stairs, wishing that I’d never agreed to come to the viewing.

Then I saw it. Huge. Bigger than everything else in the gallery, filling up most of one long wall. Blue, oblong shapes, the play of light and shadows, stone gravestones rendered almost ethereal by the effect of dappled sunlight, branches of trees transmuted into intricate cobwebs. And a young woman, arms outstretched, dark shades on her eyes to mask the sun but face lifted up to it. She looked as if she were about to take off and fly, to rise up and soar above the tombstones, like a girl in a Chagall painting.

I ran back upstairs to seek out the gallery owner, haggling over the price but knowing I had to have the painting, whatever it cost.

Now twenty years later it still hangs in my house – actually now house number three – a key house hunting requirement for me has been a room with a wall big enough to accommodate it. The painting often attracts comments from guests, speculating about what it means. Many first believe it to be a photograph – or say it reminds them of a photorealist painting by Gerhard Richter.  One person was convinced the setting was Brompton Cemetery, another declared that the young woman was dead – the image was of her spirit wandering among the graves. Some people have expressed horror at the idea of living with a picture of a burial ground – my own personal memento mori. Do people really believe death might be catching?

A few years after buying the painting I tracked down the artist – thanks to Mr Google – and was invited to visit him in his Whitechapel studio.  He confirmed that the setting was indeed Brompton Cemetery. In my football season-ticket owning days, I often used to walk through the cemetery from Earl’s Court en route to matches at Stamford Bridge, and I would look along the overgrown pathways between the graves, hoping in vain to catch a glimpse of the mysterious girl. The artist said nothing about who she was, so I still have an excuse to speculate. What do you think is the story behind the painting?