When I was about two, I accidentally knocked a boiled kettle on myself. I am scarred, in many ways, from that.

I don’t know. I prefer it that way.

I was an air display pilot for 15 years, and watched most of my friends die in crashes. When the children came along, I got out of it.

I rolled back the images. Looked again. There it was. A new tumor, large, filling my right middle lobe. It looked, oddly, like a full moon having almost cleared the horizon. Going back to the old images, I could make out the faintest trace of it, a ghostly harbinger now brought fully into the world. I was neither angry nor scared. It simply was. It was a fact about the world, like the distance from the sun to the Earth.

A television. I don’t care for things. When I moved, I downsized and threw away most of my possessions.

I’d have made more of my education.

A 12-hour nightshift at a toy factory in Southend.

For a while I wanted to be a policewoman, but I didn’t have five O-levels.

I have the invisibility of a middle-aged woman. I live in Brighton, and feel for the first time in my life that I belong. My kids are safe, my husband’s in a good place and we have a roof over our head: I can’t imagine needing more than that.

Like hunger, which feels like anxiousness, which feels like fear, which feels like excitement.