Where to begin? In one sense, there's no beginning but just a chain of causation that stretches back forever. In another way, the beginning is the frayed edge of my memory but I can't start there either because my life dissolves like figures disappearing into fog. All I have is a palimpsest of impressions, fragments of events, times and places and people that might be half imagined, in an order shuffled and reshuffled by so many acts of recollection. Do I remember those times, or just remember remembering? So much is lost, there are so many forgotten faces and faded days and moments swept away by time.

Perhaps I should begin with the first time I thought there might be an end. It was a warm summer day at the beach, a slight breeze blowing from the sea. A little place called Goodrington on the southern coast of Devon, where we spent almost all of the earliest holidays that I can remember. Out in the sea a young father is playing with a little inflatable dinghy whose occupant is a very thin and sickly young boy. But here comes a huge wave... The man loses his footing and slips as the wave sweeps past him and he falls. The little inflatable is buffeted by the wave and capsizes and the child is plunged into the sea. The boy tries to scream, but he's already submerged and his mouth fills with the salty water and his eyes begin to sting and he can feel his heart hammering as he tries to swim his way upwards. He's so disoriented and panicked that he doesn't even know which way is up, but somehow he kicks and paddles and breaks through the surface. And it's dark, like there's a roof on the world. He's too confused and scared to realise it, but he's surfaced under the capsized dinghy. Then another wave comes and the boy's plunged in the water again, and for the first time he's really afraid that he's just not going to be able to hold his breath and that he'll drown and that'll be that. He just barely gulped in some air before being dragged down again into the murky water but his lungs are burning... then suddenly his father's grabbed him and he's hoisted into the bright air again and everything's okay.

That's just an event, though, not a beginning or an end but just a disconnected moment. So many of my earliest memories are like that - strikingly vivid and yet not things that fit into some greater scheme. Most of them are about holidays, I suppose because those weeks were so busy and so stand out from the rest of my life. I could talk about the time on some earlier holiday when I fell over and cut my knee open and couldn't walk without pain for the rest of the week. Or seeing my mum in hospital after the car crash that wrote off our car and cut short that same holiday. Then there were the days on the beach waiting for my dad's friend Frank to finish pumping up the dinghy, or the many, many hours that my dad and I spent in the little amusement arcade at the end of the promenade. I liked those video games so much that I'd spend a fortune on them and my parents used to complain that I was in danger of ruining the holiday by not ever wanting to do anything else. (That's why they bought me my first computer; I never looked back.) I loved the little boats on the pool just behind that arcade too, and the crazy golf, and walking around the harbour at Brixham looking at all the pleasure boats and the replica of the Golden Hind. Or riding on the train that ran from Torquay through Paignton and Goodrington to Brixham. Or the days spent hunting the shops there for rare editions of the Starblazer science fiction comics that I loved so much.

Which is not to say that I can't remember the rest of those early years. I could talk about walking back from infants school past the little cluster of shops and along the rows of houses and then the field where a little branch of the countryside cut into our suburb and my mother and I would sometimes stop to watch the horses running, or rambling around the fields next to the college with my grandad, exploring the little wood that bordered those fields and the lane that ran past our house to the cluster of tiny factories and engineering works that serviced the larger industrial estate where my dad worked, and how those little engineering works were so fascinating to a five year old boy already in love with machines. I was fascinated by the blend of mud and grime and shining steel, and the skilled men who were busy working on all those wonderful machines but who always had time to stop and talk to a young boy and his grandfather. I used to love those walks I took with my grandad, who'd point out all the animals and birds in the woods, and the strange fungi growing on the trees and talk to me of spaceships and strange planets and dinosaurs and aeroplanes and long ago times, and who'd always look for long straight sticks with me from which we could make bows and arrows, and how we'd sometimes just stop just to look up at the autumn sunlight slanting through the trees. And there are singular events too: seeing the newpapers reporting the Falklands War, and the whole experience of living in a country at war; the time my sister fell off the trailer we'd use as a slide and cut her head and had to go to hospital; the first time I saw Star Wars on a dodgy, flickery pirate video tape that my dad got from a friend from work, and how it just entranced me; writing about The Empire Strikes Back in school just after seeing it (the first film I can remember seeing at the cinema); waiting in queues with my dad to see the Saturday matinees of terrible old sf films; watching my wonderful teacher Mrs Hart setting off explosive chemical reactions and making indicators out of boiled cabbage with her; being told off by teachers for inventing my own ways to write addition and multiplication; and the time when my friend Simon wasn't in school and the teacher explained that his mum had died and he'd had to go to live with his dad (he was my best friend, but I never saw him again).

I barely know how all these things fit together or even which came first and which later. Only when I started junior school does my life become a coherent scheme. Well, that's not quite true because we were supposed to move house over the summer before I started at the juniors but it didn't quite work out like that, because the few weeks that we were supposed to be staying at my grandparents' house stretched out to a whole year. (I cried when we moved out of that house that I'd lived in for my whole life, and I still always look over at that one house with the huge extension intruding into the back garden whenever I drive past it. The house we were supposed to move into was still a field when we went to my grandparents' to live - my dad took his video camera there each week and documented the whole construction process.) So there was a whole year in limbo. My parents, my sister and I all lived in just the one bedroom, all of our things packed in there or in storage in boxes in the garage. I went to the junior school over by my infants school, but my memories of it are blurred almost out of existence by time. I remember that there were suddenly all these new people that I didn't know, and by the time I got to know some of them I moved schools again. I wasn't happy there, especially as the teacher saw that I was smart and made me sit with the hardworking girls rather than the rowdy boys. For that one year, I hated school (which I'd never done before and which I'd never do again). I never really made much effort to fit in there because I knew I wouldn't be there for long. I wasn't ever going to be a part of all of those people's stories, and most of my friends from the infants had gone to other junior schools, so almost everyone moved through my life like ghosts. I don't even remember any of their names. I clearly recall that the rest of my class were terrified of the teacher that they were going to have for their second year, but I just didn't care. I remember almost nothing about the place, or the whole year for that matter. I'm sure there are plenty of things that I remember that took place during that year but they just aren't attached to it in my mind.