With my wee sis Helena’s birthday coming up tomorrow, I was reminded today of the time we were both aspiring thespians. She was thirteen. I was a year older. One of the bedrooms in the house was empty. We planned to turn it into a little theatre, to which we would invite the kids in the neighbourhood to come and watch the dramas and comedies we performed. Helena was a natural actress – she could do all the voices and mannerisms with ease and confidence – so she would be the main performer. And me? Well, I could write shit, so I would be responsible for putting the script together. We managed to construct a makeshift stage and to hang a curtain across the middle of the room. We also filled a notebook with our ideas for sketches. But that’s as far as we got. Everything stopped when Dad fell ill. He died the following year. And not coming from a posh family, neither Helena or I went on to pursue our vocations.