I WANT to lie down and watch the trees stipple sunlight on the world, down in the garden with the moon daisies, on a blanket with my book.

CORK AIRPORT, 3.20 pm, and I’m awaiting the arrival of my brother. Not the older one I stabbed in the arm with a sharpened pencil for stealing my pillow (don’t look at me like that) who didn’t deserve it. No, it’s my younger brother; the one who used his four sisters as psychological punch-bags, whom I called “fatso” — who deserved a sharpened pencil, but never got it because he was bigger than me.

INSIDE all of us lies a secret history; the story of an immense journey told by our DNA — the biochemical molecule at the heart of the reproduction of all life.

IN THE current economic climate, when jobs are scarce and precarious — I told myself earlier this year, “You must be prepared to shoot yourself out of your comfort zone like an arrow.

I came to a workable accommodation with my Arithmophobia the second I left school; “From this day forward,” I vowed, walking through the school gates for the last time, “I will never again, for as long as I live, put myself in a position where there’s even the tiniest chance that I might have to do mental arithmetic in front of people.

I AM in Dunnes Stores, stockpiling firelighters and recalibrating my relationship with summer.

Home, 8pm. My husband and I are sitting in the conservatory.

I HAVE lost a filling, and my dentist of 20 years has moved away.

IT IS Monday morning, and I wake up, heart hammering, in bed.

THIS evening, we have watched a film about family, love and loss; 90 minutes of bleak human misery which the ending failed to redeem. Now we are in bed.