MY SISTER REQUIRED a dummy to go to sleep at night, well into primary school. She clutched a scrap of tartan cloth – ‘Red Rugs’ – in one hand while sucking on ‘Num Nums’, until my mother resolved to enforce weaning. I, the younger sister, was proud not to have such a childish addiction. I rejected dummies and instead kept a toy rabbit as my night-time companion.

The rabbit had been given to my sister by a great-aunt at Easter. When I was born, twenty months later, my sister passed him to me in a show of welcome. In photos of me pre-crawl, lying helpless as a flipped beetle, you can see the rabbit somewhere or other – he was hot pink like a disco skirt, with wide black eyes and a flesh-pink nose.