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As my eyes tracked towards the end of that first paragraph, a wholly unexpected wave of emotion rose up inside me: a sudden, overpowering force of words and worlds revisited, a return to another time. The depth and strength of it – it felt like a tight hug with someone you never thought you’d see again, or like throwing on your old self like a faded old hoody; not lost after all, only misplaced for a few years in the bottom of the wardrobe. This is one of the great powers of books, isn’t it? And one that’s easy to forget these days, with everything else that’s going on.

So anyway, I was lying in bed, still feeling a little strange but mostly just silly about the phone call, and allowing myself to relax into this deep, nostalgic haze, when an idea came to me for a script I’d been struggling with for months.

That’s how I made my living, you see. I wrote stories and scripts. I know what you’re thinking, but no, we’re not talking movies and we’re not talking novels. The manuscripts for my last two novels were neatly stored in manila envelopes at the bottom of the linen box at the end of the bed. My agent hadn’t been able to convince anyone to publish either one of them after the lukewarm performance of The Qwerty Machinegun, and so – after years of plodding on regardless – I got up from my desk one ordinary afternoon and in the midst of a long struggle with a particularly tricky passage, I just turned the computer off.