'I observe that you are,' he says. 'You're very good at holding it together. Always were.'

Wrong thing to say. Just because I'm not doing ugly crying with nose stuff doesn't mean I have no feelings, the git. Second, it's so easy to tell someone what they're like - it exonerates you from having to do any thinking or empathizing: 'Oh, Clara, she's absolutely fine, because she's really good at holding it together. Me, on the other hand... Me, I'm sensitive.' I mean: fuck off.

This is the difficulty with stepfathers, I think to myself. They come with their own detonators built in, and as a child you have absolutely no idea if - or when - the detonator's going to detonate. So you put all your eggs in that particular basket - well, your one egg. Your Egg of Self. One egg, one basket, like one man, one vote. You put your egg in the basket called 'my new daddy', and you think, 'Well, there's my Egg of Self, I don't know why I made such a fuss about putting it there: it's so happy in the basket. Everything's fine. The egg, and the basket are a pretty good match.' Sometimes this goes on for ever, in which case everybody is extremely fortunate. But sometimes something comes along and BOOM. Your egg is smashed, tipped out of its cosy basket through no fault of you own. 'Where's my new daddy now?' you think, lying on the ground, which frankly isn't a very nice thing for any child to think.

I am astonished by air travel. Astonished. I know it's the twenty-first century and even babies are used to long-haul flights, but I genuinely marvel every time at the fact you were in place A not so long ago and now you're in place B, in a whole other country - continent, in our case. It strikes me as one of those things that is actually a proper miracle - albeit one that can be explained