I’ve always loved stories. I spent most of my childhood exploring life in other worlds – hoovering up everything from Mallory Towers to Jane Eyre. I also loved to write – getting an early taste for publishing success when Debbie magazine rewarded one of my poems with a (scream!) Jimmy Osmond sew-on-patch.

By the time I’d graduated to Cosmopolitan I’d been seduced by a modern kind of storytelling – advertising. Living in the glamorous world of ‘Fry’s Turkish Delight… full of Eastern promise’ had to beat lying on my Laura Ashley eiderdown reading about it.

Imagine the thrill of working in the same building as the men who created ‘only the crumbliest flakiest chocolate tastes like chocolate never tasted before,’ even if the ad I was working on was for the McDonald’s Neasden drive-thru.

Twenty-five years down the road story-telling still gives me glee. Famous ad man John Hegarty once wrote, ‘a brand is an agglomeration of stories linked together by a vision’ and I’ve had the fortune to help create some great brand visions and stories - Johnnie Walker, Dettol and Cillit Bang (!) amongst them and, when I’ve needed to recharge my batteries, my trusty notebooks, full of stories of my own, have carried me through, depositing me back in the world of branding rekindled.

Yoga School Dropout, my first book, concerned my hapless quest to get beyond materialism in the yoga schools of India, and The Handbag and Wellies Yoga Club described my search for fertility and friendship in the windy reaches of East Norfolk. The new one also deals in yoga – but this time it’s fiction – about the choices we make between heart and head, between corporate and personal life, and between buff bodies and cake.

So here’s to story-telling; mine, yours, and ours.