Once, somewhere in a rickety Ugandan craft-shack, a concerned friend, with a penchant for economic efficiency, cautioned me not to ‘upset the market’ for future visitors. I had heeded his advice initially – quite reluctantly, I had adopted the custom of bargaining from the inexpensive to the radically cheap. I watched as the craftswoman squirmed. The shillings I had shaved off meant a lot more to her than to me. But, having paid pittance for my things, I broke: “Oh, keep the

I was born at just 1.2 kilograms. I was about as long as the portion of the arm between the wrist and the elbow. I was tiny, a little more than a speck. “Even the extra-small nappies came up to your chest!”, my Mum used to remark. My Dad said what really got him was when he saw my tiny fingernails - “they were so incredibly small, but most definitely there.” You might have guessed it – I was born premature. 2 months before the predicted day of my birth, I came into this world

I have a single enduring memory of Church from when I was a kid: sitting in the pew attempting to count the seemingly vast number of bricks in the wall behind the speaker (not that I now have any idea how many there were!). And, although I was brought up by my parents to attend Church, and was taught about Jesus, I think this memory more or less sums up my whole attitude to God and Christianity – I found it boring, and could see no need for a God in my life. ​ When I was six

Most of my family are religious so going to Church has always been normal for me. It's often assumed that this sort of upbringing makes it more likely that someone will be religious later in life, but I found that as I began wondering why my family all trooped off to Church every Sunday, I started to resent what seemed like a unnecessary chore. I found it boring and when I got to secondary school and independence, I began to think of myself as agnostic about whether God exist