I understand that you lose the register of hearing that enables you to hear crickets, and when I can’t hear crickets in the summer I’ll be really sad.

Losing my mind.

I was looking at ageing in action, in black-and-white MRI pixels, death and dissolution foretold, and already partly achieved. My 70-year-old brain was shrunken and withered, a worn and sad version of what it once must have been. There were also ominous white spots in the white matter, signs of ischaemic damage, small-vessel disease, known in the trade as white matter hyperintensities – there are various names for them. They looked like some evil pox. Not to put too fine a point on it, my brain is starting to rot. I am starting to rot. It is the writing on the wall, a deadline.

I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more. ... And so it's what I dread more than anything is the isolation.

I’ll never amount to anything. Who? He was my rival at dance school. It hurt and is something that I’ve always had in the back of my head to defy.

I would like to believe that you reunite with the people you love the most.

In South Africa I washed cars, I danced in parking lots and shopping malls, and was a children’s entertainer.

My default will always be to go for the worst-case scenario and that is something that I am unlearning.

Driven, authentic, resilient.

My father because I was 12 when he passed and I blamed him for everything in my parents’ marriage. Now I realise he did the best he could and was just figuring life out like everybody else.