At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.

Alice doesn't seem to mind because she's laughing too, and biting her lip, all doe-eyed, and tossing her freshly washed hair, and Norton tosses his lovely, glossy hair back, and she tosses her hair in return, and he tosses his, and she tosses hers, and it;s like some mating ritual on a wildlife program.

It's hard to overestimate the teenage appetite for high drama.

Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary.

For some time now she has had the conviction that life is about to change if only because it must. . . .

For his thirtieth birthday he had filled a whole night-club off Regent Street; people had been queuing on the pavement to get in. The SIM card of his mobile phone in his pocket was overflowing with telephone numbers of all the hundreds of people he had met in the last ten years, and yet the only person he had ever wanted to talk to in all that time was standing now in the very next room.

This isn't a letter, it's a gift.