I had a bad night, the night before last. Maybe it’s because F is away in Germany? In any event, there seemed to be many troubled dreams and thoughts.

And some of these things weren’t troubling at the start, only when I started questioning my memory.

Was my hair really so long when I was 19?

I always say it was down my back, putting my hand on my lower back. But, the night before last, I questioned that. Sure, washing it (and subsequently drying it) seemed to take a whole night. and although I remember THAT, I can’t actually remember seeing my hair so long. And so, that led me to question if it really was ever that long.

And the holiday in Egypt. Sure I can remember certain things (the jewellery shop; the Coptic church we were taken to; sitting in that church; handing out pens to the children afterwards; being surprised that the Pyramids were not in the desert after all but, rather, in the middle of housing estates; a walk we took from the cruise boat with a minder following us to ensure we would be safe BUT there are so many things that I don’t remember. I don’t remember the Pyramids themselves, the tombs we visited, the cruise ship on which we spent a week.

And I wonder, did I make my whole life up?

And that made me think about my time with V – and the fact that I seem to be forgetting it all. It’s almost as if it had never been.

And my childhood. I remember one night the caravan awning got ripped off the caravan in the high winds. Except I remember it more as a newspaper headline and not the event or the aftermath itself.

I remember that Gilly Gaskell and I promised ourselves to each other at the end of her garden – and I can picture the garden surrounded by roads and the corner as if I were in an aircraft, looking down – but I can’t actually picture me there or her there. OK, so I was about 5 at the time and that is now a very long time ago – but that’s not really the point.

The point is that it’s more like a film. You remember bits of the film and, if you saw it again you would say ‘Yes, that’s how it happened’ but otherwise you remember some detail and forget others and, all the time, you’re watching it, not participating.

Maybe it’s my age? Or maybe it’s just me?

Or, maybe, it all never really happened.