Lynne Truss: There’s more to me than apostrophes

“I’m a fan of the old classic gothic style,” she says. “Growing up, we’d go to all-night horror flicks and think we were above it all, but as you get older, your imagination is much less robust in that way. Now I’d never go to see a horror film unless I had to.”

Her story concerns a missing woman, a talking cat called Roger (who sounds like Vincent Price), a remote seaside cottage and an amiable retired librarian with a dog called Watson.

“She needed help, but my job kept me away from her a lot and I felt very guilty about that,” says Truss. “Even when she was obviously dying, I was at Euro 2000, phoning rather than being there. I think I gave up work far too late.

“After she died, I went quiet for about three years. But [Kay’s] death changed my life and created the conditions for the book to be written.”

“I’d written novels, plays, I’d done sports writing, and there I was with what I thought was a fantastic portfolio of interesting things to write about.

Nowadays, punctuation inaccuracy doesn’t bother her as much and she has avoided going on television shows that require a talking head on the subject.

Despite the circus that surrounded the book, she doesn’t regret writing it. “It set me up in lots of ways,” she says. “I had much more money than I ever expected to make and actually, I still love the book.

After that, publishers wanted Truss to write other books on modern language but she refused.

However, there have been moments of joy from the recognition, she recalls, such as the time she watched a David Attenborough programme on pandas.

“There was a bit where the panda put down a bamboo and walked off, and David Attenborough said, ‘So you might say he eats shoots and leaves’. That was nice.”