There is a ritual I have practised, imperfectly, for the better part of twelve years. Each morning, before the inbox opens, before the notifications cascade, I sit with a notebook and write three pages by hand. It doesn't matter what. The weather. A dream half-remembered. A sentence that arrived overnight from nowhere. The act is the thing, not the output.

I came to journalling through a period of professional frustration, when I was writing too much for other people and nothing for myself. A friend, a novelist, pressed a dog-eared copy of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way into my hands and told me to stop thinking and start scratching. I was sceptical. I remained sceptical through the first week of clumsy, self-conscious pages. Then something shifted.