Creative NonFiction: ‘Do ghosts exist? Yes, they do. I know this because I’m being haunted.”

Creative NonFiction: ‘Insidious thing, cancer. I often thought of it as a completely separate entity from my mum.’

Creative NonFiction: ‘Living with Dad was a bit like being loaded into a comedy cannon and then fired off to land somewhere, who knows where: in hospital, India, or the wrong school. He had this thing about experience, the necessity to experience life, cram as much as possible into it, and ‘develop the ever-expanding mind,’ as he put it.’

Creative NonFiction: ‘My father and I were both doctors. I use the past tense for my father, Harry Walker, because he died young. For myself, it is because I am no longer a real doctor. I became an epidemiologist and my clinical skills gradually atrophied.’

Creative NonFiction: ‘Violence gives some men wings, others the bullying power of the privately educated; some it reduces. For me, it is a source of relentless confusion.’

Creative NonFiction: ‘I feel dazed and dopey, my mind a blur of ideas and images’, writes Julia Bell. This state, and its discontents, will be familiar to many readers. With the relentless acceleration of online life over the last decade arising from the ubiquity of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, anxieties of a ‘crisis of attention’ have become commonplace.

Creative NonFiction: Half way through a story about a child and their canine best friend, I pause to think, “this isn’t going to end well.” There is a peculiar ache to worrying about the fate of a fictional pet, a kind of inevitability that doesn’t quite translate to watching human suffering.

Creative NonFiction: August, 2020. There’s a funfair on the Common. It is only a small one: a few socially distanced rides huddling well away from one another. But it is definitely there. Its placement has a defensive quality, tucked away at the bottom of the hill down by the High Road, surrounded by a temporary fence.