Like many who will be reading this, I write. I always have, even before I knew how. When I was four my mother would find me filling notebooks with infinite cursive ‘e’s, line after biro line of them, pages of stories that could never be read. ‘That’s very good practice,’ she would praise me, but my face would burn with the embarrassment of not yet knowing how to properly do this thing that seemed to me the key to all understanding.

Writing helps me make sense of the world. Though if I am really honest (and when I am writing, it is the only way to be), writing helps me to make sense of my world, rather than the world. My writing explores the emotions and relationships that make up my middle-class inner-urban life, but if I want to make sense of the bigger world, the one of wars and famine, of Wikileaks and Google, of history and science, then my own writing is of little use. It is then that I read.