1. My first notebook was given to me by my mother with the suggestion to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable (1) to those who do not see a need to do so.

2. My maiden (2) entry that I had written was an account of a woman who believed herself to be freezing to death in the Arctic night...

3. ....freezing to death in the Arctic night, only to find, at dawn (3) that she had stumbled onto the Sahara Desert, where she would die of the heat before lunch.

4. I have no idea what prompted (4) a five-year-old child to write something like that...

5. ...but it does reveal a certain penchant (5) for the extreme which has followed me into adult life.

Perhaps if I were more 'normal', I might have written about the day my cousin put a cat litter in the aquarium to fertilise the plants.