I WAS born in Wiltshire but brought up in Birkenhead. My dad’s from Manchester. My mum’s from Bristol. For years this was my elaborate response — usually followed by an explanation of where Birkenhead was — to the question “Where are you from?”

I never said I’m from Liverpool, and partly this was because I was being transparent. I didn’t want to lay false claim to an identity, to pretend that I came from the home of the Beatles and the Mersey Sound Poets, from that fervently religious city of two mighty football clubs, two mighty cathedrals.

But there was something else. I didn’t feel I truly belonged anywhere. For as long as I could remember I’d felt in some profound and unalterable way an outsider. My long-winded answer was a way of saying I’m from everywhere and nowhere. And like all outsiders, I often managed my loneliness by stubbornly refusing to belong, no matter how strongly belonging was being offered.