School was a miserable experience for me.

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My brain simply did not work in the way the school expected it to. The divergence between how I experienced the world and how others did set me apart from other children. It was a lonely place to be.

I am severely dyslexic and have dyspraxia, ADHD and some of the symptoms of autism, as well as an inability to create pictures or sounds in my mind, called aphantasia. What might seem routine to others - remembering names or avoiding bumping into people on a busy street - is for me a massive challenge. When I was tested in my forties, my reading age was 13 and my spelling age seven - the same as at school.

For most of my life, the abilities I lack have mattered far more to me than those I possess, despite a successful business career. I remember being seven on a football pitch and not knowing which direction to run. No one wanted me on their team. That mattered more to me than the fact that I could win at chess.

From an early age I desperately wanted to write. There were plays, stories and poems in my head, but my spelling was hopeless, my handwriting unreadable and sentences I thought clear made no sense to anyone else. Occasionally something escaped. I entered a poetry competition my school refused to enter me for. Their candidates won nothing. I won a prize the judges created especially for me. When the newspaper published the results, I refused to give them my school’s name and was listed as an independent entry. At university my........

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