Dear Oprah,

I wear a badge with your face on it every time I go to an important meeting. It’s a picture of you with one of your distinctive early Nineties haircuts, and it brings me good luck. If it doesn’t seem appropriate, then I wear it under my top and pinned to my bra, as a secret boob charm.

My friend Sarah bought it for me, because I love Oprah, and so my friends buy me Oprah stuff (which is why my book shelves are filled with unauthorised biographies). Why do I love you? Well, because I can’t think of any one person who has had such a positive formative impact on me as you, and I’ve never even met you.

How did you end up being a key figure in a little white girl from England’s life? Well, you were always there! From daytime telly on school sick days, to watching the Colour Purple on VHS in English lit, to popping up on my Instagram feed just now.

I’ve got absolutely no idea how I watched you as a kid. We weren’t rich: there was no satellite dish, no cable, but somehow you reached across the ocean and on to my telly in the seaside town of Worthing in the south of England, with its nursing homes, arcades on the pier and stinking seaweed. You came into my living room and brought with you the world.

Worthing was very conservative (though we voted Labour). My mum and dad grew up on the fringes of Britain and had found themselves on its most southern edge. Worthing was very, very white, with a far-right presence. There were no out gay people, lesbians, bisexual or trans people at the church I went to . Well, maybe there was one, and they were described as ‘peculiar’. People didn’t talk about their feelings.

How Oprah Winfrey inspired a generation of outspoken women