As a child I loved to fantasise about being a cucumber. In the evenings I would lie with my arms against my body under my dinosaur duvet, sometimes straight as a candle, other times with my legs slightly bent, and try for just a moment to take on the form of my favourite vegetable. I’m a cucumber, a cucumber, a cucumber, I would whisper to my eight-year-old self, until I realised that cucumbers cannot whisper. From then on I would repeat my mantra inside my head, until it occurred to me that cucumbers cannot think to themselves either. But by then I had usually fallen into a sweet, deep sleep. Nota bene: this was a time when mindfulness didn’t yet exist and meditation was still something so exotic that just the idea of it was enough to send most people into a wild panic.

I lived with my parents and my brother Carl in a Vinex-wijk, a housing development on the outskirts of a medium-large town in the Dutch provinces. The houses on our street were made of white bricks held together by light grey cement. Most of the residents had painted their window frames blue, red or yellow, primary colours that appeared lurid against the pale stone. There were a lot of children living in the development and thus an imposed speed limit of thirty kilometres an hour. Family cars moved through the streets towards school and work like heavy animals, grazing bison in flatlands of straight pavements and basketball courts. Only in the evenings would you sometimes hear a car pull up fast. And every now and then a scooter.

With their holiday money the people on our street would usually buy a new parasol or a pressure washer. Or a holiday of course. Most of our neighbours would staycation like us, going camping on the North Sea coast or to a holiday park in the Veluwe, but occasionally, at the end of August, a suntanned family would ride back into the street, having pitched up for three weeks in a Spanish field with a caravan and a small marquee. They would be treated like VIPs at the neighbourhood barbecue that was held every year in the first weekend of September. My room wasn’t big, just eight square metres, but it was mine. In it was a bed, a tiny dark green dresser and an IKEA desk. Because I was in love with P, a boy from my class, I had carved his name into the desk (on the back, so that no one would ever see). When I was very small, I insisted that my room be decorated with rainbow-spotted wallpaper that made me feel as though I were surrounded by an endless stream of falling confetti. Later, pulling strips of said paper off the walls became its own bedtime ritual (along with fantasising about being a cucumber).