I’m sitting by the window and it’s a wet and uninspiring morning in Glasgow. I have a blanket over my knees, my shoes are off and I have a new book in my hands. I feel the same way I do when I’m in my seat in the auditorium of a theatre minutes before curtain up. Or perhaps it’s like being buckled in and getting ready to take off on a long flight.

Other people’s stories give us the chance to find out who we really are, but also the chance to lose ourselves in their world. The best storytellers take you there effortlessly, so you barely know you have left the room.

With their bewitching prose and easy descriptions, I’m easily led down that road. Susceptible and ready to be seduced I can leave my world behind in a heartbeat. Two or three pages in and I’m sitting on the steps of 28 Barbary Lane or wating on a table in The Homesick Resturant.

When we were locked down - my world opened up. With more time to read I travelled across contintents, book by book. Hardbacks rather than holidays gave me the chance to broaden my horizons.

Sometimes their lives and experiences were reassuringly familiar and cosy, other times it’s so removed from my experience that my head hurts from trying to imagine it. But their world is my world now.

Most of all, it’s the American storytellers I’m drawn to the most, spending time with Chicago detectives, southern housewives and Manhattan socialites. I am so immersed that sometimes I read aloud without embarrassment. It’s a sonorous, midwestern accent no matter the actual location of the story. And I realise that all American voices are Garrison Keiler’s.