"Haven't you finished that book yet? Your sister was reading entire books by your age," I remember my mum saying. I think I must have been about five or six at the time and it's one of my earliest memories. The book was called The Magic Finger and it was by Roald Dahl.
I went on to become a devout and somewhat precocious reader, which was pretty much de rigueur in our house growing up. Mum was an English teacher and Dad a copywriter. Words, quotes and books were our thing.
Yet I often wrote numbers and letters back to front and it took me years to learn how to tell the time, to distinguish between clockwise and anti-clockwise, and to learn how to tie my shoelaces. And my handwriting was so awful one teacher used to smack me on the knuckles with a ruler (thanks, Miss Grayson). I put it down to being left-handed but later on, at secondary school, I struggled with grammar and pronunciation, despite the fact that English Literature was one of my favourite subjects.
I compensated, much like Taggie, the dyslexic heroine from Dame Jilly Cooper's Rivals, by learning at least one new word a day and memorising pages of our battered thesaurus.
You see, dyslexia wasn't really recognised much when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. I think Mum just thought I was a bit hopeless. I always knew I wanted to write though and was thankful when spell check came in when I started working as an editorial assistant in my 20s.
Yet even though I've now been writing professionally for over 20 years, I still have to look words up, check grammar and make silly mistakes. And sometimes I can read a page and miss whole bits out of it.
When I became a parent and tried to teach my children phonics, I struggled. The sounds and words felt alien to me and then, when my middle child, who is autistic and has additional needs, also struggled to learn how to read, we had a lightbulb moment thanks to the educational psychologist. She suggested that we scrap phonics and go back to the old fashioned, rote learning method that I used. Bingo -- my son was reading in weeks.
So when a colleague said she was working with a dyslexia specialist who worked with adults, I signed up for a diagnostic assessment.
Around 10 per cent of the population, that is 6.3 million, are dyslexic according to the British Dyslexia Association and one in six adults have the expected literacy levels of children aged between seven and nine. Dyslexia, which primarily affects reading, writing and information processing, can also impact organisational skills.
Could it also help explain why I am quite disorganised then?
Laura Gowers, the founder of This is Dyslexia, a qualified teacher and a special educational needs coordinator (SENCo), tells me that a number of adults also have what is known as "stealth dyslexia". But what is that, exactly?
"Dyslexia can sometimes go undetected in people like you, who have strong reading skills," she tells me. "And those with a strong underlying verbal and visual ability learn to use refined compensatory strategies to manage it."
Adults with stealth dyslexia may, for example, be able to read fluently but unintentionally add words in, have difficulty pronouncing words or have to read the text several times to truly understand it.
It's not all bad though. People with dyslexia often find that their verbal skills and strengths in problem solving, intuition and creative thinking help compensate for any shortcomings. I would certainly say that creative thinking, in the case of my job as a freelance journalist who thinks up and sends pitches to editors every day, is something I've cultivated over the years. As for verbal skills, after interviewing everyone from hospital porters to CEOs over the years, I'd like to think I can talk to anyone.
Fortunately, these are the sorts of skills -- problem solving, creative thinking and so on -- which employers look for, according to a recent report by Made By Dyslexia, a global charity, and recruiter Randstad. The study showed that around three quarters (73 per cent) of people believe that problem solving is a key indicator of intelligence -- followed by creativity and imagination (60 per cent) and people and communications skills (59 per cent). Yet almost half of people (46 per cent) also view accuracy in spelling, punctuation and grammar as important indicators of intelligence.
After an initial chat, during which I tell Gowers how, among other things, I was consistently inconsistent at school (I was frequently told that I had potential but was underachieving and so on), she sends me a couple of questionnaires, one for dyslexia and one for ADHD.
Gowers explains that ADHD and dyslexia are the two most common coexisting conditions. In fact, a study by the University of Edinburgh, published last month, showed that ADHD shares more genetic links with dyslexia than with other neurodivergent conditions, such as autism and Tourette syndrome.
My eldest child was diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago and I have more or less self-diagnosed myself with it after finding out more about the condition.
The questionnaires take a good few hours to fill in. I'm asked to outline my concerns, my strengths and weaknesses, my family background, education and any visual difficulties I may have. The ADHD questionnaire feels very close to the bone -- I was the child who was constantly told off for talking, not paying attention and blurting things out in class. As an adult, I have learnt to try and curb some of that impulsivity but I still have the concentration span of a gnat.
We then do the diagnostic assessment online and it takes about an hour and a half. Gowers tells me that dyslexia is characterised by weaknesses in cognitive processing, such as phonological processing (how fast an individual can scan a range of visual symbols and deliver a phonological response), phonological awareness and working memory.
We start by testing both my verbal and non-verbal ability. While my verbal ability (word puzzles, vocabulary and recall) is strong, my non-verbal abilities (where I have to match different images, from shapes to sequences), is average.
Next, we looked at working memory, where I have to repeat back and recall digits or letters, going up to seven digits and six letters at a time, and then try to reverse them. I find it much more challenging to concentrate and recall them and can only manage up to four digits and letters in reverse.
When we move onto phonological memory, where I am asked to repeat unknown, blended or made up words, I struggle. Gowers says I probably struggle with verbal memory and retaining auditory information when it's presented phonologically because it's a key characteristic of dyslexia.
"The ability to hear, identify and recognise sounds, hold them in memory and repeat them accurately contributes to how we learn new words," she says. When it comes to testing my phonological processing speed, which involves two tests examining my ability to retrieve phonological information from memory and to perform a sequence of operations quickly and repeatedly, I flounder.
"While your understanding of vocabulary is at the top end of the above average range in the 97th percentile, you use this ability to support your weaknesses," Gowers tells me. "Although your tests to determine single word reading and spelling ability are within the mid average range, when compared to your underlying ability, there is a discrepancy."
This discrepancy, where your ability and your skillset don't actually match, is apparently at the heart of dyslexia.
Gowers explains that my weaknesses in phonological memory, awareness and processing show that my skills are not "secure". "These weaknesses suggest the presence of dyslexia and are consistent with combined type attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD]," she says.
While I also demonstrate strong verbal ability, resilience and problem-solving skills, my short-term memory is in the low to mid-average range. "This is central to memory and has an impact on whether information goes into working and long-term memory," explains Gowers.
Perhaps that's why I can never answer any of the questions on University Challenge, which is always frustrating, especially when it's a Classics related one. I did Greek and Roman Studies at Exeter but, having dodged Latin at school, I ended up struggling with it at university.
There was also a discrepancy between recalling a series of numbers and recalling made up words. This too is consistent with a dyslexic profile, says Gowers."Whilst underlying ability is not a criteria for a diagnosis, it is the discrepancies between a person's underlying verbal and non-verbal ability compared to [their] working memory, phonological awareness and phonological processing that indicate the presence of a specific learning difficulty."
These are all areas that I show weaknesses on, which suggests both dyslexia and ADHD (although Gowers is only qualified to assess dyslexia rather than ADHD).
I find the diagnosis, after all this time, quite comforting and wish I could tell my late mum about it. I wonder what she'd say. Perhaps she would feel guilty for chastising me for not reading that Roald Dahl book, which I must have read another 10 times; I loved it so much. Dyslexic or not, I am grateful she passed on her love of reading to me.
"There are perhaps no days of our childhood that we lived so fully as those we spent with a favourite book," said Marcel Proust, the French novelist
I can't say that finding out I have dyslexia at this stage of life has changed how I do things but it's made my inner critic, the one that chastises me for having to look up how to spell that tricky word or where to put that comma, less harsh. And, for better or worse, I've managed to find a job that I mostly love so maybe it's benefited me in some ways too. I'll never be able to forgive that teacher for hitting me on the knuckles though.