I get up at 5.30am, sluice myself and have two Weetabix and some mint tea, before starting to write by 6am.

Jenni Fagan is the real thing, and The Panopticon is a real treat: maturely alive to the pains of maturing, and cleverly amused as well as appalled by what it finds in the world.

Like a lot of people, for a long time I thought that the road to hell is paved with bad sequels.

Honor the miraculousness of the ordinary.

But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

I deeply adored my mum. She was an extraordinary person, even for the prejudice I'm likely to have. She was beautiful, amusing, a tremendous elaborator of things into comic proportions and extravagant in her imagination.

I'm ensuring my place in heaven.