My ambition was to write. That was my promise to myself. I believed I had a talent. I believed I had something important to communicate. I believed. I felt. I still feel it and yet the days and nights pass without any significant work.

Knowing about time and my 71 year existence as a lucky blink of an insignificant eye, I know I don’t have a long time to live now: maybe ten years of decline barring road accidents, metastasising prostate cancer, random stabbings or the “weird freak accidents” my daughter always thought would get me. I think my heart is OK. But then lots of dead people thought that…

Things are happening to me now.

Funerals are about honouring the dead in order to comfort the living. A fine endeavour.

I’ve been to a few funerals lately. I’ve heard a few eulogies. They’ve been for better men than me, I thought. Men who provided. Men stoic in the face of pain. Men liked by other men. Men who only ever loved one woman; the one at the funeral.

Other men are different men. So am I.

I am scrambling to find some coherent and constant identity to honour when my family needs comfort and consolation.

Who have I been? Who have I really been? Where I’ve been is another matter.

Some thoughts return too often as I seek this accurate explanation for my life, my personality and the consequences of my actions and inactions.

I get conflicting advice: about this project: “don’t look back” versus “go back, confront, understand and overcome the trauma so you can know yourself, free yourself and be the self you would otherwise have been”.

Consider life flowing quickly across the sky in an arc from dawn to sunset. I am somewhere around my own personal dusk, When I consider the almost complete arc of my life I find it hard to recall who I was before my mother’s suicide. It happened when I was nine. 62 years later I still haven’t written the day down,

I know more now. I have read the books about trauma. I know that she became pregnant with me when my father was still a soldier, that I was born before they were married and that she suffered post-natal depression then.

I do remember a time before the event. The imperfection of me in relation to the giant and honourable soldier did not begin with the event at Tooting Broadway Underground station. It was an event. There were other events and associated emotions before and after.

I remember being scared a lot; avoiding fights with the boys from the next block of flats. I also remember being a leader based on my being a little bit cleverer than Paul and the others

I know a lot more now about depression and what it does to relationships; including relationships with babies and young children and to relationships between mothers and fathers. I know now that traumas can damage small children before their earliest memories.

So very very many of us baby boomer babies were must have been damaged by the consequences of the second world war. Fathers with physical and emotional injuries both proud that they had fought for freedom and unaccountably angry when we exercised any of that freedom. Mothers going back to work too soon or isolated at home. Young mothers who “had to get married”, without a white dress, shamed by their parents’ neighbours. Young mothers who wept a lot.

We grew up in our turn with our own traumas; our own injuries and our own wounds; also unaccountably angry but differently so. We all did different damage as we lost who we could gave been and grew exponentially- incident after incident, small decision after small decision, event after event – further and further away from ourselves.

I’m working my way back to me. I think I am in me somewhere.

Stay or go. Its up to to you.