Some music refuses to be ignored. Whether it makes you swing your hips or well up with emotion, it demands your whole attention. It says: here I am, the most important thing in the room. Other kinds of music can disappear into a thrum like traffic on a busy road nearby. The noises smush together into something you simply forget is there. The Original and Best of Nina Simone is something else. It’s the kind of music you might put on when you have friends over for a glass of wine. It changes the feeling in a room without being demanding. You might not realise how much it’s adding until that last track finishes and you suddenly wonder what on earth could do the job as well as it just did.

I’m not saying Nina Simone is an unobtrusive artist. There is something faintly absurd, perhaps even indecent, about taking music containing so much anguish and human force and using it to make the kitchen feel nice while wiping crumbs from a worktop. Yet somehow it isn’t. Why not?

Despite her singular voice, we can listen to her sideways, catching a lyrical phrase, a piano melody, the sudden roughness in her tone, before drifting back and letting the record recede. It remains whole, however much or little attention we give it. There is something generous in that, but also a kind of sadness: being beautiful whether heard or ignored.

There are many beautiful things that do not insist on being noticed. A tree outside a window might improve somebody’s whole life without their knowing it. Only once it was gone would they understand what it had been doing for them. We often measure music by its ability to seize and hold our attention, but perhaps another measure is how empty the room feels when it stops.

It turned out that what felt natural to me was, to other people, a very odd approach, and the final turn into magical realism, which had been the entire point of the main character’s journey, seemed to destroy the value of the psychological realism that came before it for a lot of readers. But a small number of people loved it. I thought I was probably just going to be an author with a committed cult readership so I leaned even further into my process.

The next novel was even stranger. I’d somehow written a love story in which the heroine spends much of the book trying to escape the physical world while the narrator sees helping her do it as proof of his love. It was darker, the dialogue contained more ideas and the magical turn was deeper and more disturbing. I had high hopes of writing a nightmarish portrait of solipsistic romance and obsession, but I never really got to find out if I’d succeeded. The publisher struggled to work out how to position it and, after a lukewarm reception in book-blogging circles, it was swiftly forgotten about.

Then came the numbers

One thing that became increasingly clear after publishing these novels was the machinery that my work disappeared into. I had an agent pitching me to publishers. Then my publisher had to explain the book to a designer, get bloggers and reviewers to read it and then try to win space on bookshelves and tables. They wanted to be able to claim at least some proximity to a recognisable genre, or another author, so that they could explain the work in simple terms, produce the book in a way that made sense and then convince the booksellers that it would appeal to their customers (AKA readers).

After publication, besides getting an occasional Q&A, website piece or podcast invite, or reading comments and reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, I didn’t get much sense of how it was going. Then every six months I would receive a royalty statement and the sales numbers.

After all was said and done, The Blackbird Singularity sold about 3,000 copies and Farzaneh and the Moon sold about 1,000. Prior to their publication, I received an advance of £750 for each book. There were a couple of royalty statements where I was earning out the advance, then a few others that totalled roughly £500 in payments. That meant about £2,000 for four years’ work.

These are not numbers to quit your day job over.

The graveyard of possible Matt Wilvens

My greatest ambition had always been for my creative writing to pay for the freedom to keep writing so having two novels successfully published that nonetheless resulted in financial failure made me think strange things. Like, if I can write and publish decent literary fiction that doesn’t sell, surely I can also write some other kind of fiction that does?

That sent me spinning off into QUITE the writerly identity crisis. I could convince myself that I should be writing just about anything except whatever came out of my unconscious mind with a blank page in front of me.

I tried too many projects to mention, so I’ll restrict the overview to those that I got more than 50,000 words into: a literary family saga; a digital epistolary novel in the vein of “Werther for the social media age”; a Kafkaesque nightmare set in a sentient government building that had automated all bureaucracy; a speculative thriller where a family moves into an AI smart home and is psychologically manipulated by it. There were a couple of attempts at straight commercial thrillers. Even a kung fu crime caper screenplay (this one was actually completed and got to the quarter-finals of the Big Break Screenwriting Competition - but I couldn’t get any agents to read it).

I was never short of ideas or work ethic. I could not stop generating words and words and words. But I kept selecting new projects and writer identities for myself, and each and every one of them ended up seeming absurd.

Every time I got about two-thirds of the way into something I’d think, Yeah, but is this really me? Will people even read this? Do I want to get stuck writing generic stuff like this? If I write in this weird niche will I always have a day job taking up most of my time? I couldn’t settle into any project because I was trying to make each one satisfy both the creative life and the successful one.

The seduction of professional planning

The more I overthought what I should write, the more planning seemed like a solution. Planning made me feel intelligent. Planning gave me the impression that I might be in control. So, of course, I thought: if the problem is producing a commercially recognisable object that I can also stomach writing, perhaps I can plan one.

I can research the market. Construct my premise around hot topics. Build themes on cultural interests. Look for gaps on the shelves. Make diagrams of narrative events. Connect clouds to dotty lines and circles to zigzags that circumnavigate different coloured boxes with important words inside. It all feels like VERY serious work.

More importantly, it allows me to go on and on making decisions indefinitely without ever facing the blank page. And by the time I do face the blank page, if I ever do, I might find myself with 400 words to write that have a very narrow function, a series of must-includes and the sense that not much invention is left. I just have to trawl through the beats and press the letters until it exists.

This can stop the work being pulled towards something nobody knows how to sell or wants to buy. But obviously I found out that the more I decided what the writing was going to be before I wrote it, the less there was left for me to discover and create. And I found this quite boring.

I was trying to solve two different problems with one book

On the one hand, I had my creative problems: what do I actually want or need to write? What is meaningful to me? What do I want to give to the world? How do I want to express myself?

On the other, I had my commercial problems: how do I make a living from writing? How do I get people to read what I’ve written? How can my writing become something that people want to buy?

For years I’d been skipping between projects trying to magically solve both problems at once. Or I’d solve one more than the other, become dissatisfied, and flip back into the opposite mode, searching for an ideal concept, a perfect overlap, some kind of book that would satisfy me creatively and succeed out in the world.

But the commercial problem and the creative problem are not the same problem.

What certainty produced

The only thing I finished in the last seven years was that wacky screenplay, and that was because I knew exactly what kind of film it was. I knew how long it should be and what would need to happen for it to feel satisfying. I could look at every little scene and think: this needs to happen, that pressure needs to increase, and this character’s motivations need to evolve in this way. Every time I sat down to write, it was very clear what I had to do.

In a way, this was a blessing because I had a demanding full-time job and two small children to look after. It meant I could use a half-hour grasped at the end of the evening productively. If I knew what kind of thing I was writing, I could just give the inevitable scenes a dash of my favourite seasoning and move forward.

By then, though, I wasn’t approaching any new piece of writing with a genuinely blank mind. In my early twenties I could assume there were infinite books ahead of me. The blank page was full of great discoveries and unwritten stories. Now, in my forties, there was a project graveyard. I’d watched myself abandon dozens of things and every new project came burdened with evidence from the deaths of the others.

The problem was the questions I was constantly asking myself. Is this really me? Is this any good? Is this what I’m supposed to be writing? Am I wasting yet another year? Will I finish it? Will anybody buy it if I do?

The weird thing about the screenplay was that none of those questions mattered very much while I was writing it. It was a “money in a suitcase” flick, an ode to 80s genre films and 90s crime cinema, with some nods to my favourite popcorn directors. I just had to get to the point where the heroes either escaped with the money, lost the money or chose to live without it.

Working on something I “just knew” how to write was insulating me from the odd things that appeared when I faced the blank page, and the quagmire of second-guessing that happened after.

The blank page experiment

At various points along this timeline I just said, “fuck it.” My aspirations seemed ridiculous. Despite some evidence that I could write, I had no real reason to believe any particular project was going anywhere. If I had been the kind of person who could quit, I probably would have. Instead, I would occasionally scrap everything and just write something completely fresh and unplanned on a blank page.

The goal was always simple: I would face the fear that the creative act might be meaningless and worthless and weird and do it anyway. No genre, no plan, no rereading, no backward revision. I just had to sit there and make something up. Then, the next day, I had to pick up from exactly where I left off and keep writing.

I reached this point again last week. The interesting thing is that there’s always something to write, and then something else the next day. By day three what I was writing really needed an edit and I was desperate to go back to sort it out but the blank page hadn’t exposed me as some oddball writer incapable of producing anything other people might actually want to read. I invented a man, a dead wife, an old lover, a mysterious phone call and enough emotional pressure to generate a story.

However, this did mark a dangerous moment - one where I might accidentally create yet another project. I had to tread carefully. So, just as it was getting interesting, I stopped.

What’s going to become of me?

When I started writing this article, my plan was to end on an immaculate: “I am now an instinctive, forward-only, unplanned writer. I write whole drafts over the course of 150 days, edit them from start to finish three times and then I’m done. Hear me roar.”

But, of course, the blank-page, forward-only writer was just another temporary theory of myself.

Being loose and creative actually made me want to go back to my sprawling family saga. Why? Because I realised it was the last thing I’d had any real creative fun with. I was enjoying the struggle of writing in third person and figuring out and subverting what was for me a new storytelling method. And I liked how the characters kept surprising me. I smiled as I wrote them. And I smiled imagining readers reading them. There was energy there.

My problem is that I turn myself around so much that I forget the simple pleasure of writing what I like. Planning can work. Genres can work. Improvisation can work. Commercial fiction can work. Even a huge literary family saga can work. What doesn’t work, at least for me, is asking each project to answer the questions: Is this really me? and Will this book succeed?

I don’t know if I’ll finish the family saga this time. I don’t know if it will be any good or whether anybody will want to publish it. Those are real problems, but they are not the problem I need to solve when I sit down to write it.

For now, I just want to write the story.

She says it with conviction. Not as a throwaway complaint, or not only that. She means it. She has understood something. She knows when the deal has changed, when the explanation does not match the outcome, when the rules have been applied differently, or when the world has failed to arrange itself in a way that makes moral sense.

Sometimes the injustice is small. Who got the bigger strawberry, who had the first turn on the seesaw, who got to sit with mum. But the feeling underneath is not small to her. It is total. The whole structure of the world seems, for a moment, to depend on whether this thing has been done properly.

Now my son has started saying it too. He is two and a half, and there is a threshold he has crossed. He is still tiny, still soft around the edges, still closer to babyhood than childhood, but he has arrived in the moral universe. He has started negotiating, comparing, making appeals to an order he has only just discovered.

“That’s not fair.”

He does not know what fairness would look like. But he knows, with complete bodily certainty, that something has gone wrong. It is not yet philosophy, but the seed of it.

Having children reminds you that fairness is not an abstract idea we acquire later. It is one of the first ways we experience the world. Long before we can explain justice, we can feel injustice. The child does not say, “I have identified an inconsistency in the moral framework.” The child says, “That’s not fair.”

And often the child is right. Not about the solution, or the scale of the offence, but that fairness matters: that rules mean something, that power should be answerable, and that there is a difference between not getting what you want and being treated in a way that is wrong.

Adults are quick to hear “that’s not fair” as whining. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it is a child practising one of the central human acts: noticing that the world is not neutral, and asking it to explain itself.

I think philosophy begins in our first refusal to believe that “because I said so” is a good enough answer. Not because parents are tyrants, but because children discover that authority and explanation are not the same thing.

A toddler’s outrage is raw and exhausting, but it is recognisable. It survives into adult life, with better vocabulary and worse honesty. We stop stamping our feet but we do not stop feeling the unfairness. We dress it up. We give it adult names: principle, grievance, justice. Sometimes those words are noble and necessary. Sometimes they are a more sophisticated way of saying, “Why did they get the bigger slice?”

The question underneath is worth taking seriously. Moral philosophy begins with questions like these. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why should I be good in a world that does not guarantee goodness in return? Why is effort not the same as reward? At the root of these questions is a protest. A human being looking at the arrangement of things and saying: this should not be how things are.

Philosophy is what happens when childish outrage learns to stay in the room long enough to become thought. The feeling is hot and immediate. The thoughts that follow are slower: what would fairness be here? What am I owed? What must I accept, and what must I not pretend to accept?

That last question matters, because acceptance can be a virtue, and it can be a hiding place.

Which brings me to Stoicism, or the version of it now fashionable in certain corners of the internet. I do not mean the whole tradition, which is richer and stranger than its online summaries. At its best, Stoicism asks us to distinguish between what is within our control and what is not, and not to be ruled by every passing appetite, fear or humiliation.

There is wisdom in that. Anyone who has spent ten minutes with a small child knows that not every feeling deserves to govern the room. There is mercy in learning that the world does not stop turning because you are disappointed, and freedom in realising that other people’s choices, the weather, the past, chance and time cannot be brought under the command of your will.

But there is another thing calling itself Stoicism now. Harder, flatter, more performative. Less about wisdom than control: not understanding pain but proving you can withstand it. It tells people, particularly men, to become harder, quieter, less permeable to the world. Its commandments are simple: don’t complain, don’t need too much, don’t let anyone see the wound.

Stoicism like this is self-pity in armour. Rather than asking whether something is wrong, the wearer takes pride in enduring it. The grievance remains, but it is polished into a personality. From a distance that can look like maturity. But it is a strange kind of strength if it depends on refusing to hear yourself.

On the other end of the scale is the adult who never grows out of toddlerdom, who turns every frustration into persecution. Delays become disrespect, boundaries become rejection, unequal outcomes become personal injury.

Children have to learn proportion: that wanting something does not make it just, that fairness is not preference, that other people are real. Nobody wants to live with an adult who has kept the moral range of a toddler.

But adults have to learn something else: that acceptance is not always wisdom. Resentment can be information. Exhaustion can be evidence. The part of you saying “this is not right” may be the most truthful part of you still speaking.

The adult who grows too far away from the child may become unable to recognise injury at all. They endure an unfair relationship, workplace, expectation, or demand on the body and call their silence strength, confusing endurance with wisdom until the complaints cease to register.

The permanent toddler says, “Everything is unfair because everything should be arranged around me.” The false Stoic says, “Nothing is unfair because I can teach myself to endure anything.” Neither is wise. Both are still trapped inside the original cry. One keeps shouting it at the world. The other buries it so deep that it begins to speak through other means.

This is where the body enters the argument, and where I stop theorising, because I have run the experiment on myself.

Before my children were born, my body spent a year saying “that’s not fair,” and I refused to listen. I was shrinking inside my clothes. I woke three, four times a night to go to the toilet. My calves seized when I stretched in bed. Sugar soaked into my eyeballs from the outside in until my sight narrowed to a dot of focus. To each signal I applied my maturity. Tiredness meant I was working hard. The weight loss was welcome. Men slow down at thirty-five. I had spent my life avoiding fuss, and that was the problem. I had ignored my pancreas failing for over twelve months.

The blood tests ended the argument. The surgery rang the same day and sent me straight to A&E. There was so much sugar in my blood that the staff couldn’t believe I had walked in. I had come close to dying of Type 1 diabetes, and the thing that nearly killed me was not the disease. It was my discipline. I was so good at not complaining that I could not hear the complaint.

The body is much less impressed by our philosophies than we are. It does not care what we have decided to call strength, or whether our suffering fits the story we tell about ourselves. It has its own language, older than thought and harder to deceive. It does not always know the whole truth. Like a child, it can overreact, mistake discomfort for danger, sound the alarm when what is needed is patience or courage. Not every strain is injustice. But sometimes the body is the first honest witness, registering what the mind has spent months explaining away, knowing what a situation costs before we are ready to admit the price.

A certain kind of Stoicism teaches us to override these signals. Push through. Don’t whine. Other people have it worse. There is truth in some of that. Responsibility is not unfair because it is heavy. Love is not unfair because it requires sacrifice. Parenthood is not unfair because it interrupts your sleep, your plans and your ego. But some heaviness is not the weight of life. Some endurance is self-abandonment with better branding. I called mine composure while my blood was turning to syrup.

The distinction is hard to make, and it cannot be made alone. The adult and the child in us have to remain in conversation. The child says, “That’s not fair.” The adult has to ask, “What exactly do you mean?” Is this pain the price of love and work, or a signal that I am cooperating with something damaging? Am I being asked to stretch, or to disappear?

A signal is not an instruction, but it is still a signal. Pain is not always proof, but it is still information.

“Know thyself” begins in the body of the child who has noticed that something feels wrong. To know yourself is not to master yourself. It is possible to master yourself by ignoring yourself: to become disciplined and productive while losing contact with what your life is costing you. I built an identity around being the person who copes alone, and it nearly cost me the life it was organising. Self-knowledge has to be more intimate than self-control. It has to involve listening, and the humility of admitting that the parts of us we find embarrassing may still have something to say. Including the part that wants to say, with no elegance at all, “That’s not fair.”

My daughter will keep saying it. My son will too. For a while our house will be full of it. The wrong bowl. The wrong socks. The wrong amount of peanut butter. The profound moral injury of daddy doing bedtime. They will say it when they are right, and when they are not, and when the distinction is unavailable to them because they are five, or two, or human.

I will still find it exhausting. Sometimes I will say, “It is fair,” when what I mean is, “I cannot litigate this before breakfast.” But I hope I don’t train it out of them. I hope they learn proportion without indifference, resilience without numbness. And I hope they learn how to listen when some small, ancient part of them says, “That’s not fair,” and asks them not to look away.

They bought the house in October. It was a mid-terrace Victorian on a street off Mansfield Road in Nottingham. Three bedrooms. A narrow hallway with an original tiled floor. The living room at the front had a bay window and good light but at the back of the house someone had put a partition wall through the old kitchen-diner. It had divided what would have been a large open space into two small dingy rooms. The windowless dining room was barely big enough for a family table and the kitchen was cramped with cupboards and appliances.

On the first viewing, the estate agent walked them through and stood in the narrow dining room talking about potential. Meg looked at the partition wall from both sides and saw an open-plan space that could hold a table for six. The added space along the wall could house bookshelves. There might even be room for a small island of kitchen cupboards where the wall currently stood. The room was already there. The wall was in the way.

Rob had made a list of jobs on his phone. He added things to it and reordered the urgency in the weeks leading up to the move. Rewire the upstairs sockets. Replace the bathroom suite. Sand the floorboards in the front bedroom. Knock through the partition wall. Whitewash the back bedroom. He read the list to Meg on their first night while they sat on the floor in the bay of the empty living room eating fish and chips from the paper. The house smelled of old carpet and paint stripper. Their furniture was arriving the next day.

“I’ll do the wall on Saturday.”

“We should get someone in to check it first,” she said. “They might have run wiring through it. Or pipes.”

“It’s a stud wall,” he said. “There’s nothing in it.”

“We don’t know that.”

“It’s just a stud,” he said. “It’s fine.”

She looked at the plasterboard, the thin skirting board along the bottom, and the line where it met the ceiling. She did not say anything else. She ate her chips.

On Saturday morning Rob bought a sledgehammer. It had a ten-pound head on a hickory shaft. He brought it home with a plastic bag wrapped around the head. He leaned it against the hallway wall, changed into old jeans and a t-shirt, and put on safety goggles and a dust mask.

Meg was in the kitchen doorway.

“We should cover the worktops,” she said. “And put plastic sheeting on the floor.”

“I just want to open it up,” he said. “See the frame.”

“The dust will get into the boards,” she said.

He pulled the sledgehammer out of the plastic bag and walked into the kitchen. Meg stood behind him and took a few steps back. He planted his feet before the centre of the wall, swung the heavy iron head back over his right shoulder and drove it into the centre of the plasterboard. It punched through with a flat, dry crack. The board split along a horizontal line. A cloud of pale dust blew out of the hole. He pulled the hammer back. White powder and fragments of board fell to the floor.

He put his face into the hole. Pale timber studs were visible behind the broken plasterboard. There was dust and old plaster and a cobweb in the corner of the frame. He pulled off the goggles and dust mask and tossed them on the floor. He looked at Meg.

“Just a stud,” he said. “Nothing in it.”

He put the sledgehammer on the floor with the handle leaning against the wall, walked down the hallway, stopped at the shelf by the front door and picked up his car keys.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“To get the flooring samples,” he said. “For the bedroom.”

He opened the front door, walked out and pulled it shut behind him. She heard his boots on the pavement. The car door. The engine starting. She stood in the hallway and listened to him pull away down the street, the car noise melding into the hum of the city.

The kitchen was quiet. Just a hum from the fridge. She looked at the hole in the wall. The dust was settling on the floor around the base. The pale timber studs were visible through the gap. The cobweb moved slightly in the draught from the broken board.

She went to the cupboard under the stairs and took out a roll of plastic sheeting and a roll of gaffer tape. She taped plastic over the kitchen worktops, laid sheeting across the kitchen floor and taped it to the skirting boards. She put sheeting across the dining room floor. Taped it down. When everything was covered and ready, she put on the safety goggles, pulled the dust mask over her mouth and nose and picked up the sledgehammer.

The handle was thick. Her fingers barely closed around the hickory. The head was heavy. She could feel the weight of it pulling at her shoulders and her lower back. She planted her feet the way she had seen Rob do, swung the hammer back, then swung it forward. It hit the wall two feet to the left of his hole. The plasterboard cracked all the way up to the ceiling and a large triangular piece caved inward. Dust filled the air.

As it settled she looked up. A thick, dark liquid was running down the plasterboard from the ceiling plate. She swung again, breaking another big chunk off the other side of the wall, sending pieces flying into the dining room. The liquid began to ooze. On the third swing a wide section of board gave way on the kitchen side. Plaster fell in chunks to the floor, exposing pale softwood studs, two by four, spaced evenly across the width of the wall. With the plaster gone, the liquid had nothing to run down. It began dripping straight to the floor.

Meg cleared the loose plaster from the opening, grabbed some plastic sheeting and taped it over the gap. The dark liquid struck the sheet and trickled down into the dining room in a red line. She touched it with the tip of her finger. It was warm. Faint steam rose from it in the cold air. She pulled down the mask and smelled iron, copper, something raw.

Then she opened the wall wider, working out from the centre. Each section of plasterboard she broke free released more of the dark red liquid. By the time the frame stood bare, it was streaming down the studs and pooling on the plastic at her feet. There were litres of it, across her arms, across the sheeting, on the hickory handle.

She put the sledgehammer down and picked up the crowbar from next to Rob’s toolbox in the hallway. It was nearly two feet long with a flat blade at one end and a curved hook at the other. She set up the stepladder, then wedged the blade behind the first stud at the top plate. She pulled. The wood groaned. She pulled harder. The nails came free with a high screech. Half a pint of the thick red liquid poured out onto her hands and wrists. The stud dropped, clattered against the neighbouring stud and then fell to the floor.

Her phone buzzed in her back pocket. She wiped her hands on her jeans and pulled the phone out with wet, sticky fingers. A smear of dark red crossed the screen. Rob. She read the message. The place he went to had nothing but they mentioned a place in Derby doing end-of-line engineered oak at half price. He was going to drive up and have a look. Might take him the rest of the day. She put the phone face down on the kitchen worktop.

She stood with the crowbar in her hand and looked at the liquid running down the studs. More of it was coming, from every crack and gap. It was thick, leaving dark red trails on the pale wood, pooling on the sheeting.

She started taking out the noggins, levering the horizontal braces free one by one. Some came easily. Others were nailed hard at both ends and she had to work the crowbar back and forth until the wood gave and the nails bent loose. By the time she had cleared them, her arms and shoulders and neck were spattered with red so dark it was almost brown or black.

She wedged the crowbar above the next stud and pulled. The nails screeched. The stud came free and thudded onto the kitchen floor. More liquid poured from the joint, splattering the sheeting. She moved to the next stud. The blade slipped in her wet hands. She tightened her grip and pulled until it came free and slammed to the floor.

She worked methodically, prising the studs loose one by one while the dark liquid poured from the joints and spread across the sheeting. Hours passed. Her shoulders burned. Her forearms shook. Blisters rose across her palms beneath the red stains, then burst under the pressure of the crowbar. By the fifth stud the skin had torn away in strips, leaving the metal slick in her hands.

She stopped and stood inside the stripped frame. In the dining room, the largest puddle on the plastic sheeting was nearly an inch deep and over a metre wide. Liquid still dripped from the ceiling plate and from the joints where the studs had been. Every nail she pulled released more.

She picked up the crowbar. The metal was wet and sticky. She wrapped her torn hands around it and tightened her grip until the pain was steady and specific enough to bear. She stretched her back, pressed her fists into her lower spine, and went back to the wall.

The last stud was tight against the side wall, the nails long and driven deep. She wedged the crowbar behind it and heaved. It did not move. She braced one foot against the wall and pulled with her full weight. The wood split lengthwise. Half came away. She tore the other half free with her hands, the splintered wood scraping across her torn palms, and dropped both pieces onto the pile of red-stained plasterboard.

The wall was gone. The frame was gone. Only the ceiling plate remained, a single horizontal timber running across the top of the opening. She dragged the stepladder to the centre, climbed it, hooked the crowbar over the timber and pulled down. The plate came away in a shower of plaster dust and dark red liquid. It crashed to the floor by the foot of the ladder, bounced once, and lay still. The stream gushed for a second then thinned to a trickle, then a drip.

Meg stepped down and stood in the open space. The light from the kitchen window reached all the way through to the far dining room wall. It crossed the debris and the broken board and the dark pools on the floor. The space she had seen when they first walked through the house was there. It was real. It was full of wreckage and dust, and dark red liquid was dripping from the ceiling, but the room was there.

She put the crowbar on the floor beside the sledgehammer, pulled off the goggles and pulled down the dust mask. Her face was streaked with dark liquid and pale dust. Her t-shirt was soaked. She could feel it drying onto her skin, tightening as it dried.

She stood in the wreckage for a long time, gathering her strength. The light moved across the floor. The dripping slowed. The pools on the plastic sheets stopped spreading. The liquid was thickening. It was darkening at the edges where it met the air. It was starting to dry up.

Meg laid a long strip of plastic sheeting down the hallway corridor, over the beautiful original tiles, and opened the front door. They had hired a large yellow skip for the week and it was sitting by the kerb outside the house. She picked up the broken plasterboard in sections, carried it out into the skip in chunks. Most of the edges were dry with dust, some of them sticky with the dark red liquid. She got into a rhythm, holding the large pieces against her hips as she walked them down the hallway. Twenty trips. Thirty. She lost count.

She carried the timber studs out one by one. Her arms and shoulders were shaking from the strain but she managed to get each length out without knocking the hallway walls. She took all the long pieces first, then gathered five or six noggins under one arm and one final one in her hand. She had to do that five or six times.

Just the plastic sheeting was left, covered in pools of thick red liquid, darkening, beginning to crust at the edges. She started in the centre, scooping the stuff into an empty paint bucket with an old dustpan. Nearly five litres of it. She sealed the plastic lid and lowered it down into the skip.

Looking at what was left, she decided to pull up the edges of the sheets, pooling the dregs into the centre and hauling them out into the skip like bin bags. Despite being as careful as her exhausted arms would allow her to be, a few thin lines of dark red managed to ooze out onto the floorboards.

She mopped. She filled and emptied the bucket four times. The floorboards came up dark but clean. The boards were good underneath, the original pine. They were pale and unmarked where the wall had stood. A band of clean wood ran across the centre of the room.

She swept the remaining dust and plaster fragments into a pile and shovelled them into a thick black bin bag. She wiped the skirting boards with a wet cloth. She cleaned the ceiling where the plate had been.

It was almost dark by the time she finished. She had been working for over seven hours. She turned on the bare bulb in the kitchen. The room was empty and open and clean. The floorboards ran from the kitchen door to the far wall of the dining room in an unbroken line. The band of pale wood was the only evidence of the wall.

Meg washed her hands at the kitchen sink. The water stung the raw skin. She held them under the cold tap until the bleeding slowed. She dried them on a clean towel. She filled the kettle, turned it on, then stood at the kitchen window and looked out at the dark garden. The kettle boiled.

She made a cup of tea, carried it to the far wall of the dining room and sat on the floor with her back against it. She could see the whole room from where she sat. The open space. The clean boards. The pale strip in the centre. She held the cup in both hands. The heat stung her torn palms. She held it anyway. She drank her tea. The room was quiet and finished and hers.

Strangely, it took being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes for me to understand that I had become a happy and well-balanced person. In the run up to it, I thought I’d just been getting old - feeling weaker, tired, losing my edge. I’d been telling myself, “Everything is fine.” “I’m going to let this miserable feeling go.” “Just ignore this pain and carry on.” It was positive denial, misguided stoicism, part of the mental apparatus I had developed to maintain a pragmatic positivity - but working against me.

As it turned out, my pancreas was shutting down and my body was in grave danger. My hard-earned positivity made me miss the signals for over a year. This was one of many lessons the disease was about to teach me.

Type 1 diabetics usually get diagnosed in childhood or early adolescence. My symptoms came much later and escalated slowly over the course of twelve months: severe weight loss, waking three or four times a night to urinate, a deep thudding heartbeat, unquenchable thirst, constant hunger, headaches, blurred vision, cramps in my legs. When it was finally undeniable that something was truly, physically wrong, I went to the doctor’s to have some blood tests.

He called me in record time with the results and told me to go to the nearest A&E immediately. The glucose levels in my blood were over six times those of an ordinary adult. He said it was surprising that I could even stand up. When I got to the hospital, I remember the phlebotomist flinched and grimaced when she saw my blood filling the vial - because it was so syrupy.

Everybody at the hospital kept telling me how hard an adjustment it was going to be. The diabetic specialist tried to ease the news of a lifetime of days with at least four insulin injections and eight finger prick blood tests by telling me that I was finally going to start feeling better. Of course, the diagnosis and the extent of the treatment was a shock but I didn’t find it particularly difficult to accept. My partner was more distressed than I was.

She couldn’t believe how well I was taking it. I had a lifelong autoimmune disease that was changing the way I had to think and behave around all foods and activities for the rest of my life and I was fine? She was beginning to suspect that I was repressing a deep primal anger or about to plunge into a bottomless depression. Her worry even made me suspect myself but I couldn’t sense anything ominous. I had to adapt, or die. It was simple. Somehow, I was ready.

In fact, contrary to the warnings, I found a quiet serenity creeping in. A love of people and things and the world that I had never quite managed to fully realise before. I wanted to live and flourish, enjoy beauty and being. I was feeling mortal and vulnerable, but open and full of love.

The thing that made me crack was when I read that the average lifespan for a Type 1 diabetic was 66. What got to me about this, made it all come tumbling down, was how little time there was left to spend with her, how terrible it was that we might not grow old together, and that I would have to leave her alone in the world. I wanted as much time as possible, and I wanted to broaden the circle of our love. I wanted a family.

It was a powerful realisation: the depth of our love, my hunger for life, and the desire for children. It also revealed how long I had ignored simple truths, how little I’d listened to my body or my heart. The diagnosis showed me that I’d already begun telling myself different stories about who I was, and living them out. Something deep and positive had been building for years, and the jolt of illness finally brought it into view.

Meanwhile, I had to constantly count my carbs, monitor my blood sugar and be careful about every bit of exercise I ever did. I had to never get too drunk in case I slipped into a coma in my sleep, or get so carried away that I’d forget to inject myself or take glucose tablets with me. I had to keep focus and control every day or face a much higher risk of heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, blindness, foot amputation, and early death. Yet, how lucky that I’d got to 35 without it when most people get it so young. How lucky that I was the kind of person who had all the mental faculties needed to deal with a disease of this kind. How lucky that it had been caught before serious damage had been done. How lucky to be born in the age of modern medicine. How lucky to live in a country where medical treatment was free. Added all together, the equation came in fairly balanced.

I’d been given a second life.

By the time I’d got used to acting as my own pancreas, COVID came around and I was told I was part of the “at risk” community. Type 1 diabetics get every illness that’s going around and take a lot longer to get rid of them. I was pretty anxious about leaving the house and getting caught out by hypoglycemia as it was, and now some nasty respiratory disease was adding a second layer of mortal threat to any attempt I might make to simply be out on the street.

My job role was also deeply affected by the pandemic. While everybody else was getting furloughed my workload was doubling. I could work from home - which was a relief - but things were intense. Despite that, me and my partner actually had a pretty nice time, as far as pandemics go, and we got into a great rhythm with each other. By the end of lockdown, she was pregnant.

The five years since then have been a wonderful (and tiring) blur. Our daughter is four and just started school, and our son is twenty months and just emerging from his angelic phase into toddlerdom. Fatherhood is a topic drowning in clichés, most of them true. But the reality isn’t a cliché; it’s the surprising lightness of a newborn baby, or the sight of a four-year-old girl doing an avant-garde dance to the wedding march.

During these years I still wrote hundreds of thousands of words and got a long way into many projects. Writing was still something I turned to in the brief windows I had, but it no longer felt meaningful. Maybe a better way to say it would be that its meaning had been supplanted by reality. Yet the words, and characters, and worlds kept coming…

From being eleven years old, I used to scribble lyrics and stories in a notebook before bed and nervously pass them to friends the next day. One night, when I was seventeen, I was talking to a close friend about what we were going to do with our lives. I had no idea. Then he turned to me and said, “You should be a writer.” And, as they say, suddenly everything became clear.

‘That would solve all of my problems,’ I thought, ‘because that’s what I already am.’

It has taken years, illness and family to understand that again. For a long time, my perspective shifted from simply being a writer to obsessively trying to become one - grinding toward success, status, legacy. That fixation no longer gives my life meaning. What matters now is the truth I knew at 17: I am a writer, and writing is an act of sharing. That’s why I’m back, writing publicly this time. Living has given me meaning; writing lets me share it.

‘Everybody has a book in them’ – so the saying goes. Rest assured, this is nonsense. Being able to write a piece of high-quality long-form fiction is not the same as having the ideas and experience that might inspire it. However, in the spirit of the phrase, I do think it’s good to acknowledge that the writing of a book is not necessarily a mark of superior intelligence. I know plenty of people who are smarter than me, more emotionally intelligent, have read more widely, are more socially and politically aware, but have tried and failed to write a novel. They know what they want to achieve but they can’t seem to get very far beyond the point where they realise that they are not quite as good as they thought they were going to be.

Only a rare beast can write a novel. A grunting, howling thing. It has no central writerly aspect. The main difference between it and the people who don’t finish novels is its ability to deny all and any evidence of its failings. It is a pig-headed creature and, like an annoyingly persistent child that eventually gets what it wants, it denies its failures and carries on until they are obliterated by its eventual success.

This is not to say that pig-headedness alone writes novels. The creature in question also needs the obsessive and optimistic heart of a dog. For instance, when a normal-headed human-hearted person realises that their prose is ugly and clumsy, it’s full of chatty or passive language and it constantly segues into interesting but pointless reflections, they feel dismay. Their pride shrinks, their self-esteem withers and they think, ‘That’s enough writing for me today, thank you very much. I want to be a happy person.’ Conversely, the pig-headed dog snorts at the pointless words on its page and thinks, ‘I should remove these lesser successes so that it can become a much greater success. Then, I should do the same thing again, and again, and again, until there is nothing left but great success.’

A pernickety pig-headed dog often spends two or three hours working on a single paragraph, snorting at the ugly rhythms and awkward structures, growling at the useless words, but lowering its snout and snuffling through, cutting adverbs, moving commas, aligning everything to its pig-headed vision. More often than not, the wretched beast accidentally accrues some small flourishes of form and, bit by bit, its paragraph starts to read well. Everything ends up flowing and doing its job. At this point, the beast howls, ‘Success! I always knew this paragraph was a success!’

You might think I’m trying to amuse you but it’s really very sad for the other writing creatures. Dog-headed moles have been known to wander out into fields and start digging and digging and disappear into word holes forever. Rabbit-headed pigs sometimes sit with words tossed like salads across their pages, believing that they are immersed in linguistic conundrums the likes of which pig-headed dogs have never witnessed. It’s a terrible state of affairs.

The worst thing about it all is that pig-headed dogs are also incredibly lucky. “There’s no such thing as luck,” I hear you say. “Luck is a concept created to divert our fear of chaos, so that we can tell ourselves stories about being chosen or overlooked.” This is entirely false. Pig-headed dogs prove time and again that luck exists by being the luckiest creatures on the planet. After ignoring their friends and loved ones for what can only be described as sociopathic periods of time, they emerge from their novel writing and find that everybody is extremely proud of them, because their manuscript was the lucky one that got plucked from the slush pile, and it just happened to appeal to that one publishing professional who gave it a second glance. Why is this the case? Because they are pig-headed dogs!

Approach one of these creatures at a book fair and ask it, “How do you write a novel?” In reply, you will receive a wry but pleased smile. It will raise its chin and say something like, “You don’t have to be a pig-headed dog to write a novel. You just have to read a lot. Keep trying, and eventually you will get there. I’m just a normal-headed human-hearted person underneath it all.” Yet, as it speaks, you may notice its crazed obsessive eyes staring right through you, or its snout twitching at the air, sniffing for success, and, if you lean in and listen carefully, you might even hear the erratic beating of its deranged but optimistic heart.