Italy, like areas of her childhood, is a part of her world she has always kept secret from her husband. These are places she goes to renew her virginity.

There are olive trees outside and the imagined smell of their bark and silvered leaves brings with it the first unfurling of some new imperative she feels coiled up within her. Her whole body with a joyful shout know it is back in Italy.

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?