It was not unusual to see people ski the winter streets. Mothers would pull children on toboggans to fetch the messages, which is Edinburgh for ‘do the shopping’. Old ladies walked as I do now that I’m blind in the snowless streets of London, side-shuffling along the pavement while nervous hands feel for the next railing. I cracked today into a column of sixties brick, the corner of what used to be a rather ritzy rehabilitation clinic. The bruise is coming up nicely. Today’s blepharospasm doctor wryly remarked, ‘The clinic got out six months ago, or you might have been able to sue. It belongs to a property developer now and they’re a bit more hard-headed.’

My mother’s and my favourite junk shop was Mrs Virtue’s, in a basement on a corner with her name up in subtly shaded sign-writing emphasised in gold. The steps down to Mrs V’s had iron handrails curled to right and left. She herself wore a hairnet, a navy angora hat, a musquash coat, a pink-flowered pinny, many cardigans topped by a maroon one, a Clydella vest, fingerless gloves, varicose veins, stockings and socks, and what were called indoor shoes.

Mrs Virtue’s shop was a tunnel of mattresses twenty deep on either side, damp with cats’ piss. It was hard to imagine Mrs Virtue outside her musty nest. It is likely that she and her cats had a shared diet, though she smoked more than they did. I can’t think why I never stole anything from Mrs Virtue’s shop. Can it have been original virtue in me? The place was so chaotic and I so young that I understood the set-up as how things were meant to be and would not have dared spoil the careful arrangements Mrs Virtue appeared to have made. She had a face like chiffon for wrinkling and intermittent sets of teeth. Her eyes were dark and missed little.

Mummy spent hours talking to Mrs Virtue. They had far more than cats in common. I didn’t know then that these long conversations with people outside her marriage were a symptom of her loneliness as well as of her curiosity and friendliness. I am certain she was not signalling this loneliness to anyone intentionally, leave alone to me. She wanted to be the best of mothers.

It is not easy to say this out loud and before I went blind I would not have had to, but this greedy obsessive recall of trivial (and, it’s not lost on me, mainly visual) detail has clamped to me even closer as a habit since I lost my capacity to see. I was made of what I saw. I saw in panorama and in focus. I saw things at and even over the edge. I wasn’t half so good at hearing.

I’m scared I’ve become like an inventory for the sale of an old dead person’s house, what Scots call a displenishing; here I am, picking up lost bits and pieces of my scattered life to try to make something whole by putting it all together, my own flotsam and jetsam.

I plugged up my ears against the parental fighting. I think I knew that my parents, as a pair, were growing terribly demarcated from within, she the indoor and he the outdoor shoes. There was some scuffing. She threw and he hit. She slapped. He didn’t throw.

Both were sociable and attractive to the opposite sex. They took me with them to dinner parties and I either sat up with them or was put to bed in a guest room or the hosts’ bed. I remember falling asleep in a nightie from Mrs Virtue’s that my mother had laundered and starched. I had a tube of Smarties, too precious to open, in one hand. And I had done my teeth. The couple my parents were dining with encouraged me glamorously to call them by their Christian names, Gerald and Denise. He was what is called in Scotland a sheriff and she was French. From the age of three I had attended the Institut Français. It wasn’t a particularly fancy thing to do at that time in Edinburgh; it may have its roots in the Auld Alliance, that tie between Scotland and France against the old enemy, England.

When my parents woke me up, after dinner with the Sheriff had run its course, the bed was stippled all over the clean sheets by the gay fugue of Smarties.

It seems a pity to interpose ‘real time’ yet again, but it occurs to me that my use for Smarties as a child was only chromatic. I sorted them into colours, hoarded, hid and lost them or gave them away, mainly to my father who, being skin and bone, loved chocolate. From the first I knew that different characteristics inhered in each colour and that colours related to numbers and to letters of the alphabet.

I don’t like chocolate but I love to look at its outer casing. I am attached to those maps that come in chocolate boxes, with fanciful names for each mouthful. I still can’t face chocolate, unless, and this is awful, it is white and therefore not chocolate at all.

In fact, it’s probably my version of mother’s ruin nowadays and certainly this breast-fed baby’s only approximate mother substitute.

There was a sweet named Treets. Treets were like fatter, and merely brown, Smarties, and they had a slogan: ‘Melts in the mouth, not in the hand’.

I was first approached by a flasher when I was four. Actual manual work and melting in the hand not the mouth followed soon thereafter. There was one try to broach my milk-toothy mouth. I recall the feeling, as of a large eyeball with a thick lid forcing itself past my uvula. I didn’t seem to think this was unusual at the time. Families living many to a room in freezing poverty cuddled together for warmth; there was often a ‘simple’ son, who might wander the town. Having found the means of making a productive sensation, why might he not have taken it into his head to share the feeling? I simply stood aside from myself. I still have some of my milk teeth.

This intervention was exactly the opposite of reading. Reading was safe and something you went into. This invasive unshared business was something you stood aside from. It didn’t go on for long either in fact as an act or as a sequence in my life. Nor was the practitioner even someone whose name I knew, poor boy, trying to find a vessel for his pleasure.

Where was my mother at these times? She was being preyed upon too, by someone certainly less innocent than my poor urban simpleton.

Someone was circling her and smoothing her vanity, seeping into the crevices left by her dearly loved husband’s absence, away with his unsleeping work.

All my life I’ve had words that got stuck in my head as tunes do. When I was three it was San Francisco and Benozzo Gozzoli. I had no idea of the meaning. It was the sound that stuck. During other parts of my childhood, the needle stuck on various phrases or sometimes single words; ‘Pretty ballerina’ bounced in my brain for the obvious reason that I wasn’t. ‘Pink’ chaffinched away in my head for months. Ever since the fire in my Oxford house, the word that has been rolling around behind my eyes is ‘epilimnion’. I even wake up saying it. This may be a bad case of ‘Candia McWilliam’s swallowed the dictionary’, because I’ve only the slightest idea of what it means, which is, I think, the top surface of a large body of water, for example a lake. What I don’t know is how many meniscuses make up an epilimnion. Then other words attached themselves to it and now I’m bothered by the assonant but dead-end statement, ‘we swim the epilimnion’.

It has become impossible to write of my far past without being somewhat open about the present and its tense surface.

A carer brings breakfast to my cousin Audrey in Edinburgh; if it has not arrived by noon she’s fair mad with frustration, diabetes, hunger and very possibly loneliness. It is with grave difficulty that she gets about. Today, when I got up at six and started blindly doing my chores, I realised that I was like this, in inverse, about the arrival of Liv at 9 a.m. Just as Cousin Audrey is hungry for her breakfast, I’m hungry to pour out words and get them down. I have already after only six days become dependent upon the process and the presence of Liv. I no longer pace when dictating but sit slightly behind her to her right and hope that does not make her feel haunted; I’m less shy than I was, and can feel the sentences consequently relaxing. It’s less like doing a reading, and more like having a conversation, where the other person is not gagged but doesn’t talk quite as much as I do. I’m not naturally one for monologue, and was never, even at my most drunk, the life or soul of the party; one of the fears consequent upon my blindness has been that of becoming a big fat bore. The note I most resist in a female voice of any age is the note of complaint. Only French women do it at all attractively, and even then it seems to me too close to cleaving to the privileges of servility and aggression.