The way I say ‘class’ tells you mine. I am a working class hero. The easiest answer to anyone who asks me why I often write about class is that it’s just who I am – my class is the heart of me. My background shaped my opinions and my nature. It’s what I sound like and look like and identify as. But you could point out, ‘Yeah, but you now live in Crouch End down that there London. You left your hometown of Coalville (a now defunct pit town, rather than a metaphor like Coketown in Dickens’ Hard Times ) decades ago. You have a Smeg fridge. I do. It still makes me laugh. I’m immature as well as common. I was the first in my family to have a flash fridge, the first to have a washing machine, the first to go to University, the first to have a credit card, and the first to date a lord. (I felt like a different species. I couldn’t get my head round how someone didn’t have to have a job!) Under the heading of why I write about class (and class features in my wr
Fifteen years ago, I was medically overweight, and now I’m not. I lost two-and-a-half stone and I’ve kept the weight off ever since, thanks to that miracle cure of eating a bit less and moving a bit more. (It really is that simple and that difficult.) My current body, older and creakier though it is, feels more like me than the younger but chubbier body ever did. But there was a time – quite a long time in fact – after I lost that weight, when I didn’t quite believe I could get into a size 10 or 12 and shopping was— confusing. My hipbones felt weird. I wasn’t too sure of my perimeters. (Note, I didn’t say boundaries, as I’ve never been very sure about them.) I felt more vulnerable. A bit more naked, somehow. That’s what it’s been like for me becoming (cue trumpets and bunting) A PUBLISHED AUTHOR! Authors, to me, are mythical beasts. Proper writers. Wise and clever and different to us mere mortals. And while I’ve aspired to be an author for decades – whil
Seeing my book being sold in Tesco and Asda superstores is like winning the Booker Prize for me. Before I ‘became an author’ I never bought a hardback book and paperbacks are still my first love. Growing up I never went into a bookshop either – mainly because we didn’t have one in my hometown. But I loved reading and haunted the library in the precinct, and my mum sent off for a copy of Paddington for my birthday present. When I was a kid, me and my family cleaned the floors of Tesco and Fine Fare supermarkets in Coalville, Leicestershire. That was my job to earn pocket money. My dad also cleaned their windows for many years. You can tell a lot about people by the way they treat cleaners. Along with the nice people who apologised for wheeling their trolley over the bit you’d just mopped and those who joked, ‘You’ve missed a bit’, there were always a few who looked at you as if you were something they’d stepped in. Who knew then that my dream of becoming an auth
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