I WAS BORN dead. I didn’t breathe. Maybe I didn’t want to. Perhaps I was simply over-thinking it. I do that. Holding back nervously. Contemplating for just a bit too long whether I actually wanted to sign on to this project, to join this conversation or not. I arrived belatedly. After a medically inadvisable amount of time. With a machine-induced gasp. I didn’t want to be here.

I was dead again at two. I was blue on arrival at the hospital. In a taxi. It had happened suddenly. A strangulated hernia. In the supermarket car park. My mother’s car failed to start and by the time she got me to hospital I’d given up breathing. Again. A banal miracle of modern medicine revived me. She collected the car and the rotting groceries a week later from the Woolies car park.