Six lives.

Now on my sixth life, I count myself fortunate.

The first life has the quality of a dream: leafy Berkshire. A regular primary school; cycling round the English countryside armed with a black & white Nikon and a simple tent. Thoroughly Enid Blyton. The thrill of science fiction, the fundamental familiarity of family life. Competition fights and visits to peculiar family in remote Wales. The crackle of the fire and the warmth of freshly baked bread. Sleeping uneasily in the attic of a four-storey house overlooking a graveyard. Tumbling around in a Volvo big enough for us all children to lie in the boot. Canal boats and horses, homework and Tolkien.

The second Potter-like: spirited away to preparatory school, then boarding school. Strange, parallel dimensions – rituals, bells, short trousers and masters. The smell of the giant oak staircases, as old as England itself. A crow in a school desk; great shady oaks. Life through the Looking Glass. Rugby. Sodden days, bloody triumphs, caked in mud on a school bus wending its way back through the darkness. Cycle tours across the Pyrenees, Ireland, France. Finding oneself alone. Strange friends, the deeply scored timetable, sitting at long tables in winter, lying in long grass in summer. First love and the stars above.

The third is sheer adventure: the brittle darkness of the Swedish winter. Lost in the snow. Drunk. Adrift and confused. Loves, lusts and regrets. Then found again: British University life, but at home in Africa; wild nights and wild philosophies. Psychology and the inklings of routine. Everything at a distance. Suddenly transported to the American mid-west. For a year, a funny little room that I can still smell as I lie there listening to the crickets on hot Wisconsin nights, next door to the guy who fixed me up with free cable. The click of the knob and fifty channels. A diet of baked potatoes and ice-cream. Clothes in a bin-bag as I battled knee-deep snow through winter. The elegant seclusion of the library. Home again, academic triumph and the bitter disappointment of unemployment. Running in the Welsh mountains, chased by misery and obscurity.

The fourth a terrible decision; a journey to hell. A decade of torture and violence; truly a voyage to the heart of darkness. A monstrous, desperate life – ever striving for the surface, fighting daily for a taste of security. Impossibly; teaching, writing, changing jobs – debt and violence snapping at my heels. The madness of work, and a brush with death. The insanity of youth. Fatherhood as motherhood: two beautiful daughters – twice, the epic journey into being. Night after night each perfect creature cradled, fed and braced against the cold.

The fifth. A traumatic break, madness and a tiny tent pitched alone in the mountains. Finally breathing again, a first disorienting taste of freedom. Life at the BBC; creative zoology & the tick-tock of the journey to London. Lined up like penguins on the platform on dark winter days. A new beginning; normal life and normal love worn like first-time slippers. People lying drunk in the gutter on a Friday night, rock-climbing, gyms, and salsa. Everyday misadventures. A curious brush with normality: Luton Working Men’s clubs and weddings – family life teeming with cousins and distant relatives. A sense of place - as close as I would come to everyday life. A third, marvellous daughter.

The sixth. The tower. A solid structure ten years in the making - tumbling, in seconds reduced to mere rubble. Everydayness snatched from my grasp. Disillusionment and a strange disentanglement; a balancing of familiarity and strangeness. From it all a book, a civilisation born. Lost but somehow elevated; becoming the centre of all things and finding oneself at last. The odd sense that mid-way, one is coming to one’s senses. Finally awake. Belatedly entering adulthood, and embracing childhood for the first time.

As I write, the seventh is calling me. I'm in no hurry. I will tarry here awhile. I climbed the mountain - why not turn my cheek to the sun?