As a child it was always impressed upon me, as a matter of the utmost importance - more important almost than any other virtue, in fact, the first of the commandments - not to be a ‘big head’. There was no greater a slur, no more forceful a dismissal when I was growing up in the Sansom household, around our tiny blue formica-topped kitchen table, or later - when we had the extension put on – around the smoky-brown laminate breakfast bar, than for my mum or my dad to describe someone, politicians usually, but often also teachers, and doctors, or indeed anyone in authority, who presumed to speak out on behalf of themselves or others, as a big head. Indeed, my dad even taught us an old music hall song, which began ‘Why does everybody call me “Big Head”?’, which we used to chorus whenever we felt someone was boasting unnecessarily of their achievements: Mrs Thatcher; Arthur Scargill; Jim Callaghan; Robert Robinson; Benazir Bhuto; and anyone who’d passed the eleven-plus.

It’s a shame. Because if you were raised from an early age in the tradition of what one might call radical English modesty, as I was, and yet nonetheless you have dreams and desires and ambitions – and, frankly, who doesn’t, even people from Essex – and let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that you work hard and stay up late at night and get up early in the morning and do whatever is necessary to make your way in the world and that you find one day, by sheer luck and dogged determination, that you’ve done it, that you have achieved at least some of your dreams and desires and ambitions, then what you’re going to feel is embarrassment.

Not that embarrassment is all bad; indeed, to be forever unembarrassed must be worse; to be forever unembarrassed would be to become a monster of egotism, or someone on the telly. Embarrassment is not a necessary qualification for becoming a writer - not like, say, raging narcissism, which is pretty much an essential - but I have come to believe that it’s probably a big help. I find that I’m often easily embarrassed, even in my own company, and particularly when I’m writing. It often seems when one is writing, in fact, that all one is doing is learning that one can’t write – just as when one is learning to love what you’re really learning is that you can’t love, you can’t do it, but you swallow your pride and keep on trying to do it regardless. This may make writing sound like some kind of disorder or tendency, but I would regard it more as an excuse – a kind of mitigation or an apology for not doing something else; for writing something else; something better. When you’re writing you’re not really learning about characterisation, or plotting, or morality – pah! - you are learning, literally and simply, how to write, how to get a particular phrase or sentence or paragraph to move and make sense. And when one is writing about oneself what one is doing is recording something that both does and doesn’t quite exist; what you’re writing, in fact, is an excuse for the past.