Describe a friend from your childhood.

I'm going to talk about Minh, who lived two doors down from me and was my closest friend from about the age of six until we finished primary school.

We met in the most ordinary way imaginable. His family moved into our street one summer, and on the very first afternoon he kicked a football over our wall. I took it back round, he asked whether I wanted to play, and that was more or less that. Within a week we were walking to school together every morning.

Most of what we did involved being outdoors. We raced our bikes up and down the lane, built a rather unsafe den out of old planks behind his house, and spent whole afternoons trying to catch fish in the canal with a net made from his mother's old curtain. On rainy days we'd sit on his floor and draw comic strips, with him writing the stories and me doing the pictures.

What I liked about him was that he never made a fuss about anything. If I fell off my bike or we lost a match, he'd shrug, crack a joke and carry on, and somehow that made everything seem less serious. He was also generous in a quiet way — he'd split whatever he had exactly in half without being asked.

We ended up at different secondary schools and gradually drifted apart, although we still message each other at New Year. I do think a lot of my easy-going side came from those years with him.