Writing is a uniquely human endeavour. There is no shortage of other animals who have their own systems of communication, whether sophisticated or crude, but the act of committing thought, feeling and experience to the written word is ours and ours alone.

To me, writing is an essential part of the human adventure. It is how I have always made sense of the world – not simply experiencing life in the moment, but articulating what I have enjoyed or endured, whether functionally or poetically, for private reflection or to share my perspective.

I realised quite late in life that writing is not something that comes easily to everybody. In almost every job I’ve ever had, somebody has noticed that I find it not only easy but enjoyable, and I have been set to work on writing and editing well outside the remit for which I was hired.

Aged 18, working in a pub, I wrote menus and marketing literature. Aged 21, working in a recording studio, I edited scripts for voiceovers and penned newsletters. Aged 25, working an admin job, I adapted an entire suite of standard operating procedures and crafted a style guide from scratch. Eventually, having climbed the first few rungs of a corporate career ladder in clinical trial administration, I ended up actually being hired as a writer for the first time. I spent two years writing internal and public-facing literature for a company specialising in outsourced patient recruitment and retention in clinical trials, a role that demanded maximum creativity to remain engaging even in an industry governed by such strict ethical standards.

My work from that period has been translated into more than 100 languages, reviewed and approved by ethics committees around the world and published globally by pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Parexel and ICON.

These days, I am out of the corporate grind by choice and write with greater freedom and creativity than ever before. I have written recipes for The Camping & Caravanning Club, Taste of Dubai and Taste of Abu Dhabi festivals and The Riverside Barbecue School, to name a few. Additionally, I am a familiar face to readers of The Field magazine, Britain’s oldest field sports and country-living publication.

There are echoes of my past methods in my feature writing. It is, after all, written to brief, must adhere to a strict word count and requires research, though I also have the opportunity to interview experts in whichever topic I am covering to gather quotes for inclusion.