I was four or thereabouts. We were living in a little village call Union Hall in West Cork, Ireland. My father had moved us here, on the lam. He had written a shitty kiss and tell book in England that made life too hot for him there and had moved to the back of beyond in the mistaken belief that in Ireland authors didn’t pay taxes. But you had to be a good writer, so his plan fell through.

In the garden there was a swing. With a wooden slat for a seat. The ropes were thick, as thick as a pair of thumbs, the individual strands stuck out like little, fat fingers and as I leaned back and looked upwards, the ropes stretched all the way to heaven.

I was torn from my flight by the presence of my father and his random anger.

“How many times have I told you not to do….?”

Something. I didn’t know what, but some small childhood sin that seemed very important to him. The pettiness of the psychopath. I realised quickly that the question wasn’t rhetorical, not something I could brush off with a vague answer. I had to give the exact number of times that I had transgressed, even if I had no idea what it could be. So I gave it a stab.

“Six times?”

And that is my first memory: tailoring my answer to appease an arsehole. Being dragged from a reverie to face the unreasonableness of life.