Hugest thanks, as ever, to my wonderful friend and publisher Juliet Annan and to my wonderful friend and agent Georgia Garrett. Thank you to Gill Heeley for the excellent illustrations. Thanks to everyone at Fig Tree/Penguin for being great and for making great books, and thanks to Shân Morley Jones for being such a speedy and beady-eyed copy-editor. Thank you to Dr Martin Scurr – a man who makes it a pleasure to be a patient – and to Dr James LeFanu for their generous advice and elegant explanations. Thanks to Dr Frances Prenna Jones for not Botoxing me into Ming the Merciless territory, and for her hilariously instructive conversation. Thank you to Emma Beddington and John Vial. Thank you to my children, Oscar, Archie and Nell, for a) being the best children a person could hope for and b) not minding my sitting at the kitchen table, bellowing, ‘OH MY GOD, SHUSH! I AM WRITING!’ Thank you to Sophia Langmead, as ever, for keeping an eye on the little (big) beasties when I went away to write. Thank you to my friends, especially those in their Prime, for all the enlightening chats (‘You must write about feet’, ‘Well, and vaginas’, ‘Yes, and vaginas. What will happen to our poor vaginas?’).
And thank you to Eric Joyce, for everything.