When I was little, I went on holiday to Singapore, where my uncle lived. It’s one of my earliest memories of being abroad, and I think I must have been really young. The hotel had a huge swimming pool with a mini-waterfall and a little tiled island with a fake palm tree in the middle. Naturally, I immediately got an ear infection from spending too long underwater. That’s a fairly normal thing to happen to a kid on holiday but at the time, it didn’t feel normal at all. I had an excruciating, stabbing pain in my left ear going all the way through my head. I was burningly hot, and my vision was slightly glitchy. I remember this because one moment I was sitting upright in the room and then – glitch! – I was upside down in a hotel bathtub, howling while my mother hosed me with cold water, trying to bring my temperature down.

Another glitch! – and then I was back in the bed, a damp towel on my forehead, shivering, still that big arrow of pain in my skull. I became dimly aware that my dad was reading to me. He was reading from a big, beautifully illustrated children’s book which someone had packed: a book called The Seven Wise Princesses, which was a children’s retelling of a medieval Persian epic. It wasn’t unusual for my parents, particularly my father, to read to me. But this was my first memory of my dad reading aloud with the specific intention of distracting me from my pain, something that he would do again several times over the course of my childhood. I remember it so well. I can recall the sense of the pain receding even more clearly than the pain itself – the big arrow pulsing more quietly, replaced by images of Shah Bahram building his multicoloured pavilions, of walled orchards and jade bracelets. Plenty of teachable moments that holiday. Mostly about not doing three underwater forward rolls in a row, but also about how storytelling can be transportive, a kind of deliverance.