I don’t know if my father got better, but he certainly got richer. He started work in Grandpa’s grocery and gradually took over, shunting his father aside. When he finally inherited the shop he built it into a chain, and raised me in the belief that my mission in life was to climb ever onward and upward to the glorious heights of tycoonery.

I’d rather have been a vet, and if Dad had lived longer I might have fought it out with him, but he died when I was fifteen and you can’t argue with a dead man. Especially if he’s left you everything.

Every last penny.

Which was unfair on my older sister, Grace, who was left to look after me, our mother being already dead. She didn’t complain, because she’d picked up Dad’s ideas about my dynamic future.

So I ended up doing business courses, computing, economics, just as if Dad were alive, because Grace said so.

As soon as I could touch my inheritance I transferred a fair share to her, but by that time it was too late. I was trapped in business and success.

Oh, yes, I was a success. I made money. The firm prospered. I bought another firm. Before I knew it I was a conglomerate.

I tried to lose money, I swear it. Don’t even ask me how I ended up owning a cable television channel. It was a kind of accident. The channel showed light porn. The screen was always full of nubile girls wriggling around half dressed.

I changed all that. Out went the girls. In came animal programmes, stuff about vets, nature expeditions, deep-sea diving. I bought up the rights to old animal series that hadn’t been seen for years, and the public loved it. Advertisers fought to give me their business.

Suddenly I was the wonder man whose finger on the public’s pulse was never wrong, the visionary who could see past cheap smut to an audience starved of beauty, the marketing genius who could make wildlife profitable.

Actually, I just enjoyed animal programmes.