The red numbers on the digital bedside clock – directly in her line of vision – read 9.36. She was awake in the night, again, and so has slept in. Half past nine on a grey, midweek morning. She is alone. She is always alone. The light in the room is milky. It is daylight and the curtains are thin and pale grey, so whether it is gloomy or sunny outside, the light is always grey.

This is always the hardest moment, the moment of knowing. It comes within a second or two: she wakes, she opens her eyes, she acknowledges the grey light – and then she knows.

It is about getting through the day, that’s all it is, as if the day is a marathon she has to run, time and time again, that’s how effortful it feels and why she always needs to take a moment or two. It is about waking up in bed each morning and lying there while she comes to terms with the fact that she is conscious again. She reaches out a hand and turns on the small box radio next to the clock, to let a little talk or simple tune distract her from the hard fact of consciousness. After a few minutes, that distraction is what allows her to push herself upright and swing her legs over the side of the bed. She looks down at them for a moment, her cotton nightie rucked up around her hips. She acknowledges the mottled skin of her knees, the tributaries of thread veins that run down her thighs, the clenched and knobbled toes that grip the carpet – the many aspects of physical existence for a woman who is pushing seventy: primarily, in this moment, the need to rise because she has to use the toilet.

She has never quite trusted her legs first thing in the morning. She pushes herself upright, wobbling as she reaches a standing position. She straightens carefully – at her age the blood seems to take a while to travel up to the brain, as if gravity has become more burdensome overnight. She hasn’t had an absence seizure for decades now – they can return with the menopause or old age, apparently, but there’s no sign of them yet. Sometimes she wonders, as a philosophical question, whether she misses them. Absence: it seems alluring now but however alluring absence may be, she knows that unexpected absence is a different matter.