I say something as they come towards me. I can’t remember what I say but they take exception to it. I ask them for money and they start to taunt me. One of them, maybe she feels bad for me, I don’t know, sticks her hand in her pocket and pulls out a fiver. As I go to take it, she pulls it away, so I snatch it and the others start pushing me and pulling me, trying to get the fiver back, but I’m not going to let go of it. I bury it deep in a pocket and back away from these idiots. I feel a push and suddenly I’m falling, falling, falling.

Thursday morning. I am running a workshop at the university. Just over half of the two dozen students who should be present have actually turned up. My eyes flick from face to face as I see who is there and try to work out who is not and whether they are persistent absentees who need to be sent a formal letter. Grace is there. I wonder if she has remembered what she wanted to ask me.
          ‘I’d like you to write a short scene,’ I say. ‘No more than a page. Pick something memorable that has happened to you in the past week involving at least two people and write about it from a point of view other than your own. It can be that of someone else present, but it doesn’t have to be. Be as imaginative as you like.’
          ‘What if,’ asks a boy with fixed braces called Iain, ‘nothing memorable has happened to us in the past week?’
          There is a ripple of laughter.
          ‘Then write about the most interesting dream you have had in the past week, and the rule remains the same. Switch the POV.’
          Another student starts to ask a question, but I cut him off. ‘If nothing memorable has happened to you and you can’t remember any of your dreams or they weren’t interesting, just make something up. And change the POV from yours to that of someone – or something – else. You’ve got fifteen minutes. And please,’ I add, ‘don’t write your name on it.’
          Amid much sucking of pens and scratching of heads, the students slowly settle into their own thinking space. At the end of fifteen minutes I ask them to finish the sentence they’re writing and I walk around and collect up the sheets. I shuffle them and redistribute them. If anyone ends up with their own piece back again, they don’t say so. I ask Iain to read out the piece he has in front of him. It’s about a confrontation in a nightclub in town. I ask Grace to read out what she has been dealt. She reads a piece about an argument with a ticket inspector on a train that turns into a river running between high, snow-capped mountains. I ask a boy whose name I can’t remember if he will read out what he’s got. He reads out an account of an attack on a tramp, from the tramp’s point of view.

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