When I was young, I showed every sign of being quite stupid. Later, it would come as a surprise to everyone when I turned out to actually be fairly intelligent. I was not, in my early years, a star pupil. My sister was three years older than me (she still is, come to think of it), and I used to hang around her and her friends and annoy them. I had a pair of gloves joined by a piece of string inside my coat, and one of my sister's friends developed a successful method of getting rid of me. He would pull on one gloves, causing the other to disappear inside my coat. At this point I would run off to Mrs Woof, who would put them right and pat me on the head and call me her little flowerpot.

My work was a mess. My books got into such a state that Mrs Woof had to take them home and iron them. In short, if I was to become a sophisticated, intelligent, multi-talented genius in later years, it was not apparent at this stage.

When I was seven we moved from Warwickshire to the village of Houghton-on-the-Hill in Leicestershire. Perhaps missing my old friends, I was reluctant to participate with my new classmates on my first day at school. At playtime I was coaxed into playing some game which involved everyone else shutting their eyes, at which point I seized the opportunity to escape and made a run for it. One of my playmates obviously hadn't shut his eyes quite as tightly as he was supposed to have, because he saw me dash off and raised the alarm. Naturally they all ran after me and forced me to join in, and I was soon enjoying myself.

During story time one day, we were all sitting on the carpet engrossed in another work of epic fiction, when there was a loud belching sound behind me. I turned around to see someone being violently sick over someone else's head, which was rather amusing. The second someone was Jonathan Cowley, who I didn't really know at the time, but I remember talking to him at lunch that day (he'd been given free food from the tuck shop as his packed lunch was covered in vomit), and so began a long friendship.

At about this time, I was at home one day having my dinner. I'd got some kind of fish, and as I was eating, I had something of an epiphany. I thought: "Oh my god! I'm eating someone's corpse! That's disgusting!" In the light of this revelation I naturally refused to finish it, to which my mother replied: "You're not leaving this table until you've finished your dinner young man!" So I just sat there. For hours. Eventually, she let me go. I've never eaten meat since.

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