Last week I pulled a dusty book from behind a pile of others on an overcrowded shelf: the Penguin Book of Interviews. It’s a hardback, which suggests I bought it around the time the book was first published, in 1993 - approximately when I was studying for a post-graduate certificate in journalism at The London College of Printing (LCP).

I blew dust from the top of the book, opened the contents page, and it flooded back - how excited I was back then. This book, I remember thinking, held secrets that would turn me into a Jolly Good Interviewer.

But why did I want to be a Jolly Good Interviewer? I hadn’t even wanted to be a journalist. I’d studied Eng Lit at university, loved poetry more than anything else, and wanted to be a poet.