When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed - for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.

To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.

The free man never thinks of escape.

…only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

I lay there, stretched out, looking at the one star visible through the tiny window of the room. Only connect. How can you do that when the connections are broken?

I drove to Oxford with my van full of petrol and tin cans, as I didn't know there were service stations on the motorway. I pulled up on the hard shoulder and got my cans out. Then I filled up and set off again. That's how naive I was - so much not a cosmopolitan girl.