The first time I manifested my desires, I was 22, lying on a beach in Barcelona. I was half-heartedly reading The Secret, Rhonda Byrne’s bestselling book on the law of attraction, after finding it in my flatmate’s room. 

It claimed that if I desired something, all I had to do was believe I already had it, feel all the positive feelings this led to, then simply let go. My desire would then come true.

I read this with scepticism – surely if life was that simple, there’d be no poverty and we’d all win the lottery? But there was a handsome man near me who I’d been admiring for the past hour, so I laughingly tested it out on him. I closed my eyes, feeling slightly ridiculous, and visualised him talking to me. I smiled as I imagined us flirting and then ‘let go’, by accepting I’d be fine if it didn’t happen. I opened my eyes and waited.

Five minutes later, he caught my eye, grinned, and asked if he could join me. Next thing, he was telling me about his life as a model in South Africa and suggesting we go for drinks; he knew a great flamenco bar. I had officially manifested a date.

That was almost a decade ago – we had a fun evening, but he caught a flight home so we never met again – but I’ve been manifesting ever since.

Manifesting, essentially the idea that your thoughts will come true, has been around for centuries, but went mainstream in the 1980s and recently, it has had another resurgence in popularity with celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith and Gwyneth Paltrow all saying their success is down to the power of manifesting.

At first, I was sceptical. Surely the results were coincidences, or had rationally come about because of my goal-setting. But as I grew to embrace spirituality in recent years, learning about the power of my subconscious and meditating regularly, it no longer seemed so strange and eventually I took manifesting seriously.

The most powerful moment for me was in 2019, when I was writing my latest novel, a comedy about a woman going on a self-love journey and exploring manifesting, among other spiritual things. I wrote a cheque to myself from the universe for a generous sum that I hoped I’d one day receive for the book.

Exactly a year later, my agent – who had no idea what figure I’d manifested – told me I had offers from major publishers. The advance offered was the exact amount I had written on that cheque, which nobody knew about but me.