Living in a seedy youth hostel in Sydney Australia the 1980s, the author visits the labour exchange and finds work making soap and boxes.

Like my Grandma Manda before she married, I was to be a ‘maid of all work’: chambermaid, dish-washer, kitchen hand and laundress.

I am running to my father’s side because he has called me.

Britain, 1988: In a recession, landing a job, any job, is like winning the Lottery and that’s how I felt when the temping agency rang me....

“It’s a tropical paradise, yes, but you must never sleep on the floor there...”

Just before the big flood of 1972 in Rochester, New York, in the wake of Hurricane Agnus, my father moved out of our house for good.

I have named my pain and called it ‘dog’ —Friedrich Nietszche, The Gay Science

I’d never been to Birmingham before and getting off the train at the dimly-lit subterranean station was not an auspicious start to summer.

It was 1963. A blizzard blew across the grass outside the married quarters where we lived in RAF St Athan.

The source of the Actor’s anxiety arrives on the set, his partner in the scene, a male with dangling testicles each the size of grapefruit.

We’d hollow out rock hard swedes with sharp knives. When we lit the stump of a candle inside them, the smell of singed swede was beguiling.

Biden immediately dropped his briefcase and contorted himself into a wrestler’s crouch, hands in front ready to strike.

May 3rd, 1971. We're having a party. I’m six years old, and my parents still speak to one another.

These events all occurred more than a third of a century ago, a minimum of a dozen more years than he was old at the time they happened.

‘Have Chalk, Will Travel’, ran a colleague’s doggerel poem at my farewell do.

It was a bright October morning in Kabul, a few years prior to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.

Tonight I rewatch a video my son posted some time ago, of him teaching his five year old to weave on a pretty complicated loom. The patient

The wind pressed on me from the south, a lodos wind, the Ottoman wind that drives men mad. I wondered if that was what was wrong with me.

I open the case, take up the guitar and tuck the body under my right arm. It still fits, familiar; it feels like a reunion.

My Dad gave me a photo of himself to take with me as I set off at the age of seven to my tough Rhodesian boarding school.