Supermarine S.6B

If you’ve read about my relationship with Wicket, my gorgeous owl, you may have gathered I’m not the most feminine of women.

From a young age, my parents tried their hardest to create the perfect girlie. It didn’t really work out that way. My personal interpretation was that when you have a Catholic grandfather who has nine brothers and almost all those brothers have sons (only one daughter among them), and those sons have sons, it’s a scheme that’s bound to fail.

So there I was, four years old, stealing my brother’s Transformers, stashing them in a Barbie satchel, and heading out to find the nearest climbable tree so I could sit in its branches and play for a while without my brother moaning that I’ve nicked his stuff again. And, of course, before my mother could start shrieking about either her missing daughter, or the daughter up the tree who was about to kill herself. The latter is always foresight, in her case. It would go something like this: “She’s going to die! I can see it, it’s going to happen!”

I was young and the only thing I could think was, “Oh my god, why didn’t they tell me this morning I was going to die? I would have taken Starscream too!”

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