It has to be said that The Alchemist is not a book for everyone. Some I’m sure will think it’s utter poppycock. It’s just a novel after all and yet many hundreds of people live their lives by its message. And I am one of them.

Paulo Coelho’s most-loved title is one of my treasured possessions. It was given to me many years ago by a person with a truly beautiful personality; September 12, 2002 to be exact.

Through a combination of house moves, new jobs, and being in very different places with our lives she is no longer in mine, well, not properly anyway. But I have always believed that special people come to you at certain points in your life and, although they might not stay forever, you carry a bit of them with you always; a notion The Alchemist echoes.

I miss her because she is wise, and funny, and kind. Because when my dad died she wrote me a letter that spun straight to my broken heart. Even though she doesn’t yet know that pain of losing your father she got it in a single sentence.

I miss her because she made me run through enormous puddles when we got caught in a thunderstorm on our way to a night out, and then she laughed when we had to spend the evening with panda eyes because the rain had smudged our mascara.

I miss her because she tucked me up in her spare bed one night when I was wracked with insomnia and I woke hours later to a hot cup of tea and the smell of a bathtub rammed with expensive Penhaligon’s bubbles.

And I will always think fondly of her for giving me her own copy of a book she loved at a time when I didn’t even know I needed it.

She told me that tradition dictated The Alchemist should be read then passed on to someone in need and that’s what I should do. I have bought copies for other people but if you’re reading this, darling, I’m sorry but I still have the one you gave me and I will still have it when I’m old and grey.

I can’t tell you that much about the story. I’m one of those people who shuts the back cover and can’t quite remember what the plot was by the following day. What I remember is some little nugget that struck a chord or how it made me feel.

And The Alchemist made me feel like I understood life just a tiny bit better. It made me feel like any time I was faced with a difficult decision I simply had to look for a sign and I would know the way.

One day, standing in the shower with my mind unusually quiet, the words: “It’s time to go,” came in to my head and the decision that had rattled around in my brain for weeks, the one she hoped the book would help me make, was done.

Before this book my brain would have doubted the veracity of those words and set off on the never-ending cycle of ‘what ifs’ again. After it I became more aware of listening to my heart.

And so I scribbled out my resignation and handed it in that very day, packed up, and headed off to new horizons. I left behind all the emotional chaff that was bringing me down and swapped my wardrobe full of dull, practical suits for clothes that made me feel happy. The new job I had thought was dead and buried suddenly became mine and everything started to fall in to place in a year that was perhaps the most seminal one of my life.

The intervening years have had some deliciously happy days but in times when life has not been smooth looking for the signs the way the shepherd boy Santiago did on his journey across deserts and mountains has helped.

This book, though it will pain her greatly to know it, is part of the reason I don’t have children. One day I realised I was studiously ignoring sign after sign that it wasn’t meant to be, a veritable Las Vegas strip of great big neon pointers in fact, and I admitted defeat.

But its thinking is also quite possibly the reason I saw my dad just the week before he died after suddenly feeling like I should take a diversion on my way home from a few days away. We had what turned out to be one last lovely lunch in the sunshine at one of dad’s favourite places. I can’t remember saying goodbye but I know without a shadow of doubt that I would have hugged him and told him I loved him.

There are countless times when I have struggled to come to a decision or deal with inner turmoil and suddenly something has happened to make me know exactly what to do.

Just this week, as I have bickered relentlessly on the phone with someone I love I repeatedly pulled the same card out of my pack of inspirational quotes from the Dalai Lama, a card about using differences in a positive way. Angrily I shuffled and shuffled until I pulled out another about compassion healing inner anger. Today I tried one last time and pulled out ‘Be a nice person’. I laughed and randomly, on my way back from the loo, took out a book I haven’t looked at for years, 16 Guidelines For A Happy Life. I opened it up on a step-by-step exercise about having patience when dealing with someone you are finding difficult. Okay, okay, I get the message.

Yes, you might think it is all a load of bunkum. But really, for me, The Alchemist is just about listening to your heart, taking a little guidance when it is offered, letting something bigger than you decide your fate, falling backwards and expecting a soft landing.

I opened my copy just now and came upon these words.

“Why should I listen to my heart?”

“Because you will never again be able to keep it quiet. Even if you pretend not to have heard what it tells you, it will always be there inside you, repeating to you what you’re thinking about life and about the world.”

So to the gorgeous girl up there hundreds of miles away but always somewhere in my heart, thank you. This one is for you x