Two books I read in my teens made me want to be a writer. One, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, appeared when I was in the third year of secondary school and delivered a style of memoir so warm, so funny and affable that I wanted nothing more than to do the same. The other was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a very tattered tenth-hand copy borrowed from a friend (and never given back, sorry). I was mesmerised.
It was probable that I would have headed down the path to Grub Street anyway, but if you want to blame anyone for my contribution to the discourse, then Harper Lee must shoulder a small part. English wasn’t my favourite subject – that was history, followed by maths, and the profession I first saw myself trying out, after a careers fair in school, was as an actuary. Probability always interested me, perhaps because it feels like a tangible way of understanding a confusing world, and statistics are usually less frightening than one’s
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