My cultural awakening: Operation Mincemeat taught me how to cry – now I sob at everything

A musical number about a woman’s letter to her husband on the second world war frontline unlocked my ability to blub – and made me a happier person I am sure I must have cried as a child, but by the time I was a teenager it had stopped. It was probably a boarding school thing. Very stiff upper lip. My parents are not the most emotionally available human beings, either. I like to tease them by saying: “I love you.” You can see the panic in their eyes. They will normally say: “All right then, b...

By Nick Allen; as told to Tim Jonze