I like to shower early. I guess I like to wake up early, have one of those full, productive days, but I also really like to sleep. So, when I can, I sort of launch myself out of bed at seven thirty and feel my way to the bathroom, exhausted, enthusiastic; showering itself is almost my favourite thing to do. My skin is so perfect up close – when I’m washing it, staring at it, it’s only from far away that it becomes ridiculous at every angle. Fascinating like a car crash. If I wanted a day that was just right it would start that early – not dawn chorus early but seven thirty when the sky is dull and nothing is happening to anyone except perhaps somewhere hot water is hitting a tired back.

A good day starts with a shower and it goes on to a breakfast with eggs. It ends with a memory.

When I was little my parents picked flowers for a living. Grow them, pick them, box them up, ship them out… We had a couple of fields down a long track and two days after a bit of rain they were full of cracked beds of dirt where puddles used to be. We’d drive this track in a big green monster of a car and they would pull pink flowers from the dirt until their backs burnt and I would sit cross legged on the ground in a dress, of all things, and pick at it, peeling up great slabs of crispy mud like it was dead skin and there could be something new underneath – new world, new body… The sort of body that has no dead skin, on which nothing might ever die, because I wanted that, even then. I heard once that by the time you’re about twenty your entire body is new because every cell has been replaced at least once and I wanted that over and over again. I was small, then; I was so young but I was thinking that a good day is a day where nothing can be picked off, picked apart