All writing worth a read is an extension of a living, speaking voice. It’s one of the hardest things in the world to gain: listening, developing an ear, learning to judge what is most apt; and practice, practice, practice. Above all: live a life that is worth recalling. This is your mother lode, and source of a lifetime’s ammunition, the thing you are bursting to tell other people about or make sense of for yourself.

As a child at Junior School I wrote and illustrated my own stories. My first writing for a wide public came over twenty years later, at the instigation of Edward Greenfield, a critic who replied to a jokey-desperate letter from Sunderland that everybody else would have ignored. From the first I reviews I wrote came longer features and, in their wake, books.

Once I’d fallen to earth in London, I was also abominably pushy.

There are brave little soldiers who gulp down courses on How to be a Novelist, or Journalism for the Tots - proof (if such were needed) that education is the biggest waste of time that the world has known. I’m reminded too of a comment by Dan Jacobson: that good writing is "all the bits that Reader’s Digest cut out."