How to tell the story and be granted this belief, even if never as completely as I would wish? So much distance has been travelled from those far-off days and there are other things fixed firmly inside the codes of confidentiality I once worked by, and perhaps, above all, the redactions we all make on the pages of our past. And yes, when you alone carry the information, it is, of course, a pressing and constant temptation to omit or even reshape the moments when we were less than we wanted to be, or make ourselves the victim rather than the perpetrator of our own lives. I’ve realised that already.

Perhaps to counter that I have a little postcard of one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits above my desk. I glance at it often, think how tempting it must have been to leave the world a noble image, one infused with an enduring grandeur. But this is not what I see. Instead he gives us the face of an old man saddened and wearied by the incomprehensible flurries of life that have carried him here. His clothes are black, his eyes look away from the darkness that occupies one side of the canvas, but it’s as if it’s slowly moving towards his face and already seeping into his skin. A silent dignity survives the centuries. Perhaps such a final dignity will always be out of my reach because I think the only way to attain it is by telling all of the truth and I’m not sure if I can do that, or even if all of the truth is something that can ever fully exist any more in this world where the Chinese whispers of the Internet era have resulted in what we blithely call fake news.

My story isn’t inspired by an awareness of the dying of the light. I’m no longer young, of course, but in that brief hinterland that exists just before you become very old. My health is generally good, only the arthritis in my left knee that sadly prevents too much tennis a nagging nod to mortality. So I hope there are plenty of miles to go before I sleep. Nor is it about rage, because I’m not fired by an intensity of anger but rather mostly just regret and the longings you think should have withered on the vine with advancing age. That’s one of the strangest things about getting old – you assume that all the restlessness and confusions of your younger years should, with the fullness of time, be replaced by an inner security, a solidity that preserves from the high tides of life, when actually what endures is just a different current of troubling uncertainties. And if it doesn’t flow with the same spring fuse of youth and you think yourself cossetted by whatever money and status you’ve accrued, you can never swear that a single moment, whether in a waitress’s fleeting smile or a juddering memory, might not see those same defences permanently eroded.