Perhaps it’s my daughter who has taught me most. She has taught me that if I am imperfect then she doesn’t have to be perfect and so, she tells me, she will now dare to be the mother of daughters, whereas before she had sworn it would only be sons.

My memoir, or so I had thought until I found myself writing it, odd little unwritten book that it has proven to be, was to have been a love letter to Edinburgh and Scotland itself. I was made and born there. I miss it more than I miss my sight. I did not realise that was true until I said those words to Liv.

There are some jokes about being blind. Liv — who by the way has a house of her own and a life to go to and is not with me for more than five hours a day — and I have just taken delivery of rather many blueberries, perhaps enough to constitute the entire five-a-day ruling and intake of Her Majesty’s Government, if only they could get over the colour. We have had problems with Zoflora disinfectant too; you might almost think I drank it. I buy online and sometimes blindly whack in the wrong number. I have thirty packs of Sheba cat food in delicious jelly. If you get any of that jelly on your fingers, your hands smell for days as though you were a whale’s midwife.

I will now try to implement what the cognitive behavioural therapist has asked of me, that is to say speculating on how I might have behaved in order to avert disaster. My mother’s death was, I think, outside my own power to affect. I might have asked for love from, and shown more loyalty to, my father. I should have, as Claudia has done, said no to the perfectionisms by which Fram’s mother was torturing him and he was involuntarily tormenting me. I should cease to collaborate with anyone who attacks me. I rushed too often to greet my literal or metaphorical attacker. I always argue against myself. I install routines that do me harm and I am unkind to myself because I think it somehow vulgar or American or wet to be kind to that person. I should have asked for help before I became completely blind instead of saying, ‘I’m fine’. I would say that I hate attracting attention, but this is not completely true, because I absolutely love reading my stories to people and am masochistically conscious of publicity.

It is late in a life to install straightforwardness, especially, come to think of it, when pursuing the metaphor of a hook, but I am pledged by these doctors to being more direct — and it may be working. I have kept up the habit of buying books and last week I nearly dared pick up a book to read but I was afraid lest I miss the wave, the exactly right wave that will take me out into the blue open, where I shall be able to see. It was a book of verse called The Lost Leader by Mick Imlah. Even to hold it was proper physical pleasure. Soon, if I’m careful and straightforward, I may be able to do more with this book than just smell it and look forward to it.

There is one thing I have not told because I am so ashamed of it. I used to have a photograph, black and white of course, of Mummy and me in her bed. She looks about thirty-three and I look about six. My mother is rangy, her long hair is down her back, her big mouth isn’t smiling, but it is relaxed. She had the cat face that Cate Blanchett has. I sometimes gasp when I see pictures of the actress, because I see Mummy. She was not anything like so beautiful but she had ‘it’, the cat thing and the mouth and the whirl of cheek and the poise and the sexy arms and angles.

In the photo, she is wrapped in a paisley shawl. She is easy, happy, at home in her marital bed. Presumably Daddy took the picture. I had not yet started to get fat and look like my mother save with a fringe and instead of her slanting eyes, large happy ones. I’m in a nightie from Mrs Virtue’s. When I moved to live with the Howards on Colonsay, I cut this photograph in half and put the little snap of me with their big professional photographs of their six children. God knows where it is now and I’ve lost the half with Mummy on too. I did not think I would be able to speak about this since I feel scissors at my heart when I do. Or ‘when I do’ because I never have before, not even at AA.

I went to an AA meeting in Aberdeen. There were four big men off the fishing boats. The cold on the boats, all that freezing salt fish, makes heroin a useful comforter, and drinking is forbidden at sea. There was a pretty little lady with black hair and there was the secretary of the meeting. I don’t think it’s breaking any rules to say that at the start of most AA meetings there is a talk which is called either the ‘chair’ or the ‘share’, I’ve never worked out which, so I allow it its bungy ambiguity. Quite frequently, a stranger is asked to do this part of the meeting, as everyone else is, or may be, familiar with the others’ stories, though something new always comes out no matter how often you hear someone tell their tale. What I have just said is almost invariably true unless you have the bad luck to go to a meeting where a famed clown or someone with a well known ‘terrific sense of humour’ is anticipated; in these cases I’ve often felt the slippy clitter of used coin.

In that little hall in Aberdeen, with the sound of rain bouncing back six feet off the pavement in its thick strength, I told my story and everyone shared back, which means talking about their own lives and relating them to yours, having attention to ‘the similarities, not the differences’. For a non-alcoholic the principles of AA are pretty useful. That one about similarities cannot but be, quite simply, right for civilian life too. It was what Ian McEwan said the day after the Twin Towers were struck, and he was spot on. Fiction is what takes us into the understanding of people who we are not. So it is with AA.

The wee lady with the black hair came up to me afterwards at the Aberdeen meeting and put her hand on my arm. AA is quite full of hugs, touches, taps, and, most terrifying, bear hugs. ‘There is a higher power,’ she said (the higher power is what it says it is — i.e. anything you want it to be, so as not to offend anyone, believer or unbeliever).

I must have looked interrogatively at her. She said, ‘Well, I was praying to get X (another writer who is anonymous, who must remain anonymous); but I did say if X wasnae around, Candia McWilliam would do. I was just wondering, would you have time to have a wee look at these pages I’ve got on me?’ She went on to tell me a story of recent and unremitting tragedy. But she hadn’t had a drink.

In the underworld, or is it a labyrinth, of those of us who are unwell in whatever way we are unwell, there is a generous custom of passing on threads of hope. So it is that this afternoon, in a hotel room, dressed in what he has requested be ‘loose clothing’, I am to meet a total stranger who will touch me in ways I have never been touched before. For this I am to pay him in cash. I am innocent and ignorant of what the encounter will entail. The hook is trust, if not faith. The clincher was what I really loved. After I had explained the intricacies of my own name, he confided his own,

‘Arthur Jaffe,’ he said.

‘I like Arthur,’ I said.

‘But Art is good,’ he said

‘In life,’ I said.

Let’s see.

PART TWO: SEE/SAW