This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.

I really was a terrible actor. I did it for years in my twenties because it was like being at university again.

I work three days at home, and two days in the British Library or the London Library, just to get out of the house and hide from the children.

And you stupid, stupid woman, stupid for caring, stupid for thinking that he cared.

I'm just not prepared to be treated like this anymore.' 'Treated like what?' She sighed, and it was a moment before she spoke. 'Like you always want to be somewhere else, with someone else.

Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.