Allow me to introduce myself

I am the second daughter of a father who couldn’t see the point in children, he said, but we became best friends, maybe so that he wouldn’t have to become the father he didn’t want to be. Later we stopped being friends, briefly ceased being much at all, but now we talk happily over the phone again, and over cheap Indian food, and over beers. I was born in Salford in a hospital called Hope. 17 years later I met my best friend, 12,000 miles away in an arid desert city, born 17 months earlier than me and just down the hall. I grew up in a brick house in an Australian town named after a highland sanctuary with a kidney-shaped swimming pool, a trampoline, a little sister in a bunk bed below me and an older sister across the hall, whose three-storey dollhouse can still make me shake with covetousness. I live these days, again, under grey summertime skies and drop a postcard each week into a red post box for my mum. I love to dance but don’t do it often enough. I love to drink red wine or gin and but I do that too often. I love books, bookshops, new pens. Today I love Fleetwood Mac, plum and raspberry teacakes, and the incredible Doris Lessing. I am a Libran, a lapsed Catholic, an amateur trapeze-r (a trapezoid?), a copywriter, a shameless optimist, a haphazard collection of synapses and sensations, in love with the details. I’d like to stow away, to drive a campervan to the sea at weekends, to teach the world to sing, to take better photographs, to know who you are, right this second. Yeah – right now.

Hullo. It’s really my pleasure to meet you.