When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.

If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the 'O' section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop.

What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.

If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income.

You never came out the way you came in.

Taking the things people do wrong seriously is part of taking them seriously. It’s part of letting their actions have weight. It’s part of letting their actions be actions rather than just indifferent shopping choices; of letting their lives tell a life-story, with consequences, and losses, and gains, rather than just be a flurry of events. It’s part of letting them be real enough to be worth loving, rather than just attractive or glamorous or pretty or charismatic or cool.

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.