This month marks the fifth birthday of the publication of my first novel, The Diary of Isabella M Smugge. I made her up as a joke for a blog I wrote in April 2020, sick of people on Instagram banging on about baking banana bread, living their best lives, making memories and doing Joe Wicks every morning. There was a point when I was publishing four blogs a month. I was rarely stuck for ideas. Fifty-four years of life experience and obsessive reading had filled up the header tank in my brain to the very brim.