I had a dream about being born. It didn't seem like a dream. I woke up and Mum was looking out the window. I was in the wrong bed. Oh yes, I was scared during the night. Mum was scared. The most violent weather we'd ever seen back then. Mum was convinced the windows would blow apart. She described images of the two of us covered in glass.

My Mum once had a dream about everything ending. In the dream it was experienced through television. That was how you lived through things in those days. The dream men kept saying Will it drop? Will they drop it? Maybe they won't. But what if they did? Suddenly she heard a tremendous noise, a bang crash oh my god no. Mum woke up and the room was intact. She looked out the window. The milkman was swearing. A whole crate of bottles smashed upon the road.

Dad took a photo of me when I had just been born. The first one was overdeveloped. I was bathed in an intense light, or at least it looked like that. Dad tried again. Underdeveloped. Now I was swaddled in gloom.

When you are writing there are things you don't think about. The things that you do think about are Plot, Structure, Story, Themes, and on and on. What you don't think about is What if I end before the story does?

I once read an unfinished novel. It was published by a stranger online. It was written by one of the stranger's friends. The book was unfinished because the writer himself was murdered. A group of men didn't like his skin. Punched, kicked, over a bridge unconscious, just gone, no one charged. The stranger in his grief posted a story that could no longer move. I can’t remember the writer’s name. I know the events but the name is absent.

The depths of October. I’m very young but not as young as before. I remember looking up at a tiny window. A church hall all damp and horrible. Cardboard boxes piled on one side saying TESCO. I needed to escape. Maybe I can climb through that window and run back home? No, too high. Had to return to the group. There were Star Wars figures on a table. A boy asked why Luke Skywalker had a glove on only one hand. The adult couldn't answer.

Before I was who I actually am, I was the wrong person entirely. I had been assigned and nobody thought a bit of it. I was likewise. There was no possibility of anything different. It didn't occur to anyone. It didn’t occur to me.

In school there was a beautiful girl whose name I didn't know and still don't. I was so struck by her I had to pretend I didn't love her. I never once spoke to her. It made no sense. Nothing about me made sense back then. Things in general tend not to make sense.

I became fascinated by the time that existed before I was born. A decade more or less. The tail end of it burnt itself out as I grew. By the time another decade had passed, it was gone. I still have those first memories. Sensations of grey concrete, blue painted metal, drizzling rain, a pushchair. Being pushed through the traffic in that chair as the rain got heavier. Waiting for it to stop under a huge slide in the park playground and misunderstanding the graffiti.

Once in the pushchair during a very different kind of day, I was holding an ice lolly. Eventually I dropped it. Instead of crying, I thought it the funniest thing I’d ever seen. I laughed and laughed and laughed. Everyone was so bewildered that a photo was taken. In it I have a face of impish delight, pointing at the now-completely-melted lolly, looking at someone off camera as if to say What are the chances! Would you believe it!

The pushchair reappeared unexpectedly. We saw it abandoned outside a shop. Our car was parked nearby, and Mum recognised it. She wept and she wasn’t sure what to do. She took it back with us. Mum had given it to someone who then passed it to someone else. Then the someone else saw no further use in it. I assume we threw it away after we retrieved it. It’s not here any longer.

Near to where those rain grey concrete blue steel memories happened, there was a fire. It was staged for our benefit. We the children gathered at the bottom of a tall building. The fire department taught us lessons. Someone pretended to need help. He waved out of a single window, smoke surging around him. A fireman performed the "rescue". I think we all applauded. The memory ends there.

When I was a year old a newspaper stated that if a bomb went off in Westminster, the stands at Epsom Racecourse would become an inferno. In Brighton, people would feel as if they had walked past a furnace.

The depths of November. Last night was nothing but ice. Lying in bed I’m unable to sleep. I no longer stay up past midnight, I always need to recover. These days life feels like just surviving. Don’t you feel that? I think everyone feels that, even if you don’t want to admit it.

Mum is in the conservatory. She's in a plastic bag inside a grey box. She’s been reduced. Someone applied a ribbon to the box as a gesture of humanity. Basic information, name, time of death, place of cremation are all on a printed label, on one side.

Out of nowhere came a strange thought and it was entirely sincere. I was going to do it for all of a second.

I must take some blankets down and wrap them around that box because Mum must be so cold.