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

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.

I would never complain about One Day taking off but it made me painfully self-conscious for a long time.

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.

She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.

Don’t keep fighting battles that are already lost.

If she does have a failing, and it's obviously only a tiny one, it's that she doesn't seem particularly curious about other people, or me, anyway.