Everyday rituals are ephemeral prayers, a hint to the gods for protection, encircling life like a fragrant garland.

Any tiddly doorway might have an offering; a one-pump petrol station, a shrine. At a waterfall, the spray is incense-scented, and a banyan tree is garlanded with flowers. The Balinese year is drunk with feast-days (more than 60 in a year), yet every morning women also make up to 50 small offerings. Each is made of a base of coconut palm containing petals, often of hibiscus, hydrangea and marigold, a few drops of water from a frangipani flower, and a whisper of a prayer. The offerings, called canang sari, can carry a little metonymic prayer too: a bus ticket to ask for safety on a journey, some small change representing the hope for a little more money, or a condom, suggesting, I was told: ‘More sex; less children.’ They are a kind of gossip to god, a hint let slip.

When visiting Bali last year to speak at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, I was wonderstruck by the ubiquity of ritual, so much so that on the pavements it is hard to avoid stepping on these beautiful little baskets of flowers in front of shops and restaurants. I was also moved by the way in which ritual vitalises the smallest of places. Any little nook can be sprung with a still-burning joss stick or a staircase lit with the bright beauty of marigolds: everywhere has a quality of having been acknowledged, so it is alive twice over, actually and then symbolically.

No culture and few individuals live without ritual. There are the inaugurations of presidents, student graduations, the rituals of temples, mosques and synagogues, Christmas lights or Easter’s ritual opening of the doorway of spring. While