Tonight is the glorious highlight of my TV year. Never mind dragons and dead armies. Keep your top on, Kit Harrington. Forget sequins and cha-cha-cha and the low-fat yoghurt in human form that is Tess Daly. Tonight, ‘The Apprentice’ is back.

I adore ‘The Apprentice’ with a deep, dark passion. Obviously. Think about it. Money-worship. Shouting. Those fart-in-a-lift team names. Teeth so white they look blue. ‘Selling’ (wince). Staggering self-regard. The grandiosity of everyone’s CVs. Spray-on suit dresses. Undercooked business plans. Did I mention the shouting?

Oh all right, I don’t why I love it so much. I just do. (Most of all, I love the main man himself. Repeat after me: Alan Sugar is always right.) It’s probably something about the saga of learning, rewarded.

I got cross with myself earlier this year. I threw an internal strop about being in the middle of my life with everything still to learn. When will I stop being an effing apprentice? I wailed in my head.

2017 has shown me the answer. Never.

They say, if you write, you fall into one of two camps. You’re either a churner or a learner. Churners bash out the words, racketing up the chapters, splurging out rough drafts. Learners are always at a workshop or on a course or plugged into a podcast, struggling to get down more than a few polished sentences.

I know where I pitch my tent. I’m Team Nerd, always have been. Learning is my religion. Educational establishments are where I go to church. That feeling, when an idea flowers up and into the space over your head. When you realize something helium-true, which sends you floating high. It’s ascension and epiphany rolled into one.

With a greedy mind and a stable world and a nose made to poke into books, I was dealt a jammy hand. Formal education unfurled steadily for me, like a kind of academic escalator. The real learning has been done since I stepped off it.

These past years, I’ve been working out how to be a writer, and, the longer-term journey, how to illustrate. (Notice the lack of celebrities turning their hands to children’s illustration? It’s a technical skill you can’t blag.) I constantly have to remind myself that ‘done’ is better than ‘good’. Teaching myself with my own practice, I’m stiff and naïve and scattergun and obvious and mannered and narrow and all of these things, I realize, are remedied only by falling short again and again, each time, the gap closing a tiny bit more. Being a better apprentice. Endless doing, and redoing. Learning, and sharing what you learn, for as long as there is an eye to see, a hand to draw, a mind to dance over the page.

Stories come from everything inside one life. They might circle like sharks, sink down beneath you, resurface in another place, a flash of fin when you least expect it. There is always a fresh way to see things: a new technique to learn, a new medium to play with. It is the joy, the privilege, the endless path of the person who makes stuff. Sure, publication is one kind of mastery. Only: the moment your work is out there, finished, it is lost to you. It belongs to everyone else. But the work of making: that is never over.

Life needs us to learn all the time. Even if you’re Head Foreman or Medical Director or Chief Rabbi or First Sea Lord, you will always have to do something you’ve never done before. You’ll need to work out how to be kind, when your heart is broken. How to not roar ‘CALM DOWN!’ at the hyper toddler. How to do your tax return. How to stop memories fraying, the longer they trail behind you. How best to care for the people used to caring for you. How to feel the world aching for you to notice it. How to carry the weight of love without a home. How not to sleepwalk through another day.

We’ve never made it. We’re apprentices to the end. Especially us awkward sods, who insist on making stuff exist that wasn’t there before. We’re owed nothing; after all, no-one asked us to make it.

Lord Sugar is always right. And he’d tell you, it ain’t me you need. The business angel, Saint Alan, doling out the shiny reward, holding the golden keys to Success, he’d say: it’s down to you. What you weave with your life; everything you build from what you have within you.

Hear that, folks? You’re hired. You always have been.