This was the general consensus when I first announced my creative ambitions, twenty years ago. And it didn’t help my commercial prospects that by ‘writer’, I meant ‘poet’. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. But I knuckled down and got a job in publishing. Not a bad job — the people were nice, the money was OK, bits of the work were interesting. But it made me ill. Literally. I got cold after cold, bug after bug, until I realised it was the job that was bugging me.