Back at my desk, I began another book, about a haruspex, one of the Roman diviners who scrutinised the entrails of animals and who are memorialised as emblems of charlatanism. But my haruspex was entirely sincere, someone in thrall to his own baseless claims of expertise, little different from the people I heard on the radio every morning: pundits pretending to make sense of the aggregated chaos that no one could really understand; reporters being invited to speculate  on a country’s ‘mood’. I half expected someone to describe the speckled appearance of a sheep’s liver and pronounce the economic recovery therefore in full swing.

I wondered if was possible to write a story that bore witness to the unrepeatable crisis of its own creation. But I was constitutionally hostile to experimental fiction, and when it crossed my mind that I might be inadvertently writing some kind of deconstructed novel, I felt like punching myself in the face.

One afternoon, after my swim, I went for a fruitless meeting with a film producer who told me in passing that the secret to producing a masterpiece was to organise a story around a single word. His explanation worked something like this:

Play: Macbeth; theme: ambition; result: masterpiece.

Play: Hamlet; theme: not sure; result: qualified failure.

He was rich and successful and the idea had an attractive simplicity. But afterwards, it struck me that one of the many ways of understanding Hamlet is that its central character is someone who has lost the capacity to believe in stories. Once a conscientious person has shared Hamlet’s glimpse of the way the stories we tell mask instinctual motivations for power, and sex, and status, it’s hard to believe in anything ever again. A series of strange and problematic plays clusters round Hamlet in the Shakespearean canon: Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Othello and All’s Well That Ends Well – the work of someone rattled by the insight that justice, love, honour, history and progress are all just stories.

At the end of August that year, I flew to China to write an article about its surplus bachelors – a result of the country’s one-child policy. It was part of a larger demographic anomaly: the world’s missing women. In many countries – South Korea, India, China – men greatly outnumbered women. Abortion, cheap ultrasounds and a preference for boy babies meant that girl foetuses were terminated for being girls, and boys were growing up in a world shaped by their absence, a world of fewer daughters, fewer sisters, and fewer wives.