I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

Your lowest moment is temporary.

To find as many moments to laugh as possible.

I spent my life searching for family. I travelled around the world to look each one of them in the eye. Unfortunately, but understandably, for most of them, I am their biggest disappointment.

That I can’t write.

Also my most triumphant: 2017 at the Royal Court. Julie Hesmondhalgh reads my psychologist’s report over two hours. Every excruciating intimate word of it. Extreme verbatim theatre. One night only.

I made a suicide attempt at 12 or 13 years old.

I would build relationships. I would remember people’s significant moments. I would not fear closeness.

When I was a child, a member of staff at Wood End Assessment Centre [a former children’s home in Wigan] bellowed: “He copies them poems off of Bob Marley records.”