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Well, I may have had my body, but I saw it as worthless. For a start, I thought I was short, despite my five feet nine and three quarter inches; it’s amazing what an inferiority complex can do. From my height I looked down at a fairly respectable portion of the population, and yet I felt everyone w…

‘That’s OK,’ the reader tells me. ‘I understand. But what I don’t understand is why the hell you’re dumping all this rubbish in your novel rather than talking it through with your therapist. Stop messing me around,’ the reader adds, ‘and write something that’s actually entertaining: images, not sob…

I got hold of the books she’d asked for – almost immediately, of course. I telephoned her. She came. And it was all so easy that … She hung around chatting until closing time. I lowered the shutters and we talked some more, and all along I was thinking: ‘She’s going to leave now’, ‘She’ll leave any…

I’ll carry on, saying that my tears were all those things combined, and something else – the memory of having been very happy for a few hours, enormously happy, deliriously happy. They also reveal the chasm stretching between that age and the age I am now; I had mornings, I had work, salaries were …

To return to the story of G: we’d got as far as me raising the shutters of the shop each day at 9 a.m. Well, early one morning, the goddess reappeared in the shop. I was by myself; my business partner used to come in the afternoons. She reappeared, strangely enough, at a height altogether more appr…