Italian as a language, she thinks, suits children with its singsong cadences and rising lingering inflections, its quick swinging gait and easy adaptability to argument, to passionate outbursts.

She is curled up inside his smell. He always made her feel both safer and smaller – the latter the price of the former.

On a piece of wasteland in Leeds I once saw a used condom in the grass. A dead and sordid thing. And yet to my thirteen-year-old mind the whole mystery of life seemed to stream through it. Nothing I’ve seen since has been so eloquent of the thrilling and terrifying mysteries of life.

To tell a lie is to risk being caught out and there’s excitement in avoiding traps: it was an aspect of my childhood I was perhaps averse to relinquishing.

If you’re not going to feel how are you going to know what to think? Isn’t it in the nature of feeling to evolve thought?

Landscapes of fields and small clusters of buildings hurtle past outside like fragments of songs never sung in their entirety.