Let's get the preliminaries over and answer any lingering questions that might be there since the Girl in Damascus furore broke. My blog. Is it really mine or is it a half baked vanity project and exercise in self love penned by a show off doctoral candidate with no sense of empathy ?

It's mine. Every word scraped out of the blank page of a laptop is brought to the surface by me. Wriggled into sentences by me. Spell-checked by me. All mine.