It seems a strange place to start writing about the miniature, but I want to begin on the internet, because I found there, for a time, a thing I could hardly have conceived would have existed: a community of illness. I found there a space for grim jokes about vomiting on a stranger’s shoes, about pretending to understand when others talk about fry-up hangover breakfasts, for complaining about the poor quality of hospital food, about ridiculous dietetic terms such as ‘fun food’ for the kinds of things—like chocolate and cake—that cause us the most distress. I never expected to meet, however disembodiedly, so many people whose bodies are also bearing the brunt of a similar hunger.

An image circulates, from time to time, in this community of illness—virally, as it were—an ‘affirmation card’ mercifully lacking in butterflies, sunsets, dolphins or daisies. Hand-drawn, it begins with a question that seems simple but which nagged at me for weeks when I first saw it: Exactly why do we want to be smaller?