Yes, I know. It’s a slightly grand title. And another beginning. My life is about writing. Except it isn’t. When I was eight I was sent – I’ll stop at that word for a moment – sent where, and was I suitably wrapped? Sent to prison? No, they don’t send children there. Sent to Coventry, that particularly cruel place that children send children to sometimes? No, to boarding school. There’s a phrase somewhere, I can’t quite grasp it, which means the end of everything, the total end of everything. I need that phrase now.

I wasn’t suitably wrapped.

The thing that set me off on this particular piece of writing was a sentence I read last night in Olivia Laing’s beautiful book, To The River. Part of my journey at the moment, to Estonia and to becoming a writer, involves reading as much as I can about Estonia and as much as I can about writing. I’m not sure how I found Olivia Laing’s book, but the river is in Sussex where I live, albeit the east, and I live in the west, and Olivia Laing loves Virginia Woolf, and so do I. She also has another version of a rhyme my mother taught me which tells of the wood pigeon’s call. Fetch two poles, Josie, fetch two poles my mother taught me, take two cows, Susan, take twooo cows she has. I love them both. And it is easy to love the book. It flows like the river, and that flow is what I am looking for in my writing. And of course my journey to Estonia is to the east, and although Estonia would say they are the beginning of the West, it is certainly east of here. But the sentence I came to last night, and that I turned over in my mind awake in the middle of the night, is why I know that Olivia Laing knows me, and because I am known I can begin to know myself. This time this beginning really is a beginning.

I’ve always written. I remember writing an essay with the title Attics for my O level English exam. Somewhere I have an exercise book with half a page about Carl Leiter, who was to be my James Bond. There are many beginnings. Interspersed with these beginnings has been a working life. I have not worked particularly hard or been very successful. I realised recently that I make do. What life gives me, I make do with. So when, about a year ago, my car was repossessed and I could not afford to buy another, I travelled by train and enjoyed it and used a bike for shopping. And now a little money has dropped through my letterbox, and I have bought a little blue van, I am delirious with the freedom it gives me, a freedom I didn’t know I didn’t have.

What I’m saying is I’ve had a good life so far, but the working part, and the not knowing myself part, have got in the way of my writing. So I’m learning how to write, and part of learning how to write is learning about Estonia, because the two fictional characters who have become part of this story, Maisie, a beautiful young ornithologist, and Elf, a mysterious young man who speaks at least ten languages, meet in Tartu and travel to Lake Peipsi to live in a cabin to be in love and study sea eagles.

Just as these two danced into my life one morning as I was writing, dance itself danced into my life in the form of Biodanza about five years ago. I will begin my trip to Estonia to find my young lovers dancing in Latvia. It is only by dancing that I can be alive and access my private self. The Baltic Biodanza Festival led me to the Baltic and Maisie and Elf led me to Estonia.

And Olivia Laing’s sentence that set me off: Boarding school teaches boys to conceal their feelings and hide their private selves so deeply that it’s sometimes impossible to access them again.

It may have taken more than half a lifetime, but this beginning is the beginning. It can be done.