She was one of the beings graceful beyond words amid this year’s, literally, unsettling thaw. In a thaw, things rooted are induced to shift.

I began that day to try to go limp against unhappiness, though I have to this day far from succeeded.

She zipped up her boots and put on some of the August jumpers, greeted her friend Amy the film director whose illness Amy firmly knows Shaman-Claudia dispelled, and gave me a hug. She had the matter-of-factness of the seer, which is like being teased by a clever child. I liked her a lot.

It is very competitively priced, as far as I can see, the shaman world of East Scotland, and worth every silver bawbee.

Amy and I went paddling in the shiny grey sea not even a block from the shaman’s shop. We got sandy toes and walked to Amy’s car in bare feet along the pavement. I cannot remember if we did buy the ice lollies that false memory supplies, as I would have in Portobello with Mummy after swimming.

When I got back to Minoo, he had been listening to Will Self. He was particularly charmed by Will’s family-man graces in the authors’ yurt, and how he put on his cadaverous churlishness so as not to disappoint his fans, who were queuing two and a half times around the square where the Book Festival is held. Minoo was delighted because he was pretty sure that Will had his mother-in-law with him. Not surprisingly, Minoo is a devoted proponent of the extended family. I hope this doesn’t embarrass Will, who maximises the stretch of his alarming outer gifts while cultivating his inner delicacies of grasp and attachment. A very tall man, he has been unafraid, in the metaphorical sense, to grow right up.

I told Minoo over his teacake and butter about the companion-animals. I didn’t say what kind.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a tiger and a snake. That was me and Granny, looking after you.’

It is very seldom that his grammar falters.

‘Granny and I,’ he said, before I’d breathed.

Chapter 5: Mine Eyes Dazzle

After a first fit of the grand mal type, if that is what it was, a number of precautionary measures can be taken. They do not conventionally include a seaside trip to a newlywed shaman, but of those offered at a time when things had fallen apart, that seemed the most practical and effective. The consultant neurologist with whom an appointment had been made automatically by the hospital cancelled it on the day, even though by the time of this appointment, four months on, I had managed to be once more in that same hospital. But that’s to come, and hospital doctors are horribly stretched.

No one could work out why I had had a fit, so, or and, they stopped trying to. The consoling phrase used to me, as a layperson, by several doctors, was that I had ‘boiled over’ and that this is more common than one might suppose. I don’t doubt that. It’s a safe statement. There are a jolly good number of folk out there and you don’t want to go running away with the idea that you’re any different.

The only serious biochemical theory advanced for my fit was that I had given myself, in that careless way patients will, hyponatraemia. I mentioned this to a handsome wild boy who does much clubbing and who enjoys the attendant refreshments. Hyponatraemia is well known to him. It is the consequence of drinking an enormous quantity of water. Disco biscuits give you a thirst like a gravel pit. As a consequence of hyponatraemia, death is not unusual, the salts in the brain and blood having become drastically diluted.

I do drink a lot of water, but not that much. When I told the doctor who proffered this theory how much water I drink, I translated the imperial measures wrongly into metric, probably a mistake hardly any except the very oldest clubbers make, so I said litres for pints.

Like an alcohol counsellor, he doubled the number of units the client had actually offered as the amount imbibed and arrived at the conclusion that I drank eight litres of water daily. He had been seeing me almost fortnightly for a year and I had shown no symptoms of water damage before. Though I had put on several stones in weight, which might relate to some of the drugs, now that I mentioned it.

I wasn’t able any longer to walk around energetically as I had before I was blind, so I took account of that and ate carefully. I had fluctuated in size all my life but this fat felt doomy. It was solid and already old; it was hard like lamb fat. I could imagine it white and solid over the cold grey stew of my inner life. My limbs were no longer of any shape. They fell like sacks and settled oddly; sometimes I had to pull my legs across one another with my hands. I had been used to sitting with my longish legs crossed twice, at knee and ankle, for comfort.

I couldn’t sit in normal chairs without worrying that I might stand up with the chair stuck to my uncontrolledly voluminous arse. Yet at the start of 2008, when I went to my uncle Clem’s memorial service, before starting on all those high-dose prescription drugs, I had been able that morning to touch my forearms to the floor when I touched my toes, meet my hands behind across my back, and stretch so that my head lay on my calf when I sat on the floor with my legs in a V. I had had long slimmish legs and feet that I could fit into proper shoes. I had had flexible arms, not legs of mutton. I wanted to look nice for my surprisingly dead handsome uncle and his great-nephews and niece, my children.

Something was rebelling, now, only a few months on. I looked out of my body as does Winnie the buried woman from the pile of rubbish in Beckett’s Happy Days. My head came through, but even it was thicker, to look at.

I was not asking for the old ranginess in my fifties. I was just baffled by yet another thing gone quite so quick, another lost identifier. Fram is right to say that it is vain to mind the loss of what was never certainly mine in my appearance.

But the loss of usability, on a sudden, is a blow. I now had mass of a sort I felt unable to control, and was absurdly weak, for a woman who has lifted, carried and walked all her life. I was moving with the slow barging diffidence of a learner lorry driver who can’t yet work his mirrors. I knocked into people.

They did not always like it.

I got called names, or whistled at, ironically. I was twice asked in the street if I wanted a fuck. That makes you jump if you can’t see.

I avoided going out as much as I could.

On sunny days I saw less, after all, and I was ashamed of exposing even my clothed physical self.

I began to treat myself, as I have done periodically throughout my life, as the ugly person I had often felt like. I did it with practised dissociative skill.

I spared friend and stranger the sight of me.

I worried especially about this for my daughter. A pretty girl may not want a raging corker for a mother; but nor does she want a tired sow with lost eyes, who holds the wall when she feels her way along and appears to have shrunk from six feet down to five and a bit as she bends over her stick.

After the tentative suggestion of internal flooding after my fit, the judicious doctor wrote a prescription, which I took round the corner, paid several pedigree cats for, remembering that blepharospasm is a private matter medically (and drugs for its treatment therefore need a private prescription), and kept on obediently putting them into my mouth twenty-four times a day. I never less than liked this doctor. I never wasn’t interested by his method and levelness. I would say that I had perhaps wasted his time, to the tune of many cats. I have time too, though I have been conspicuously less good at selling it.

That August after the fit, Fram shook away the end of that academic year to tend his garden. Our son and I were at first in Edinburgh, at the Book Festival, fitting as many authors as we could into a day. It’s a pursuit that baffles me and makes me shy until I am in my son’s company when it feels just right. I suggest this is because he is an author born, whatever he chooses to do with it, and certainly he is a born reader, and to see with his ears or hear with his eyes has become one of my most reliable forms of escape from myself and the forms of thought that ambush me when the world’s sap sinks.