Google has this handy and terrifying feature called Timeline, which shows you everywhere you’ve ever been, how many times you’ve been there, and how long you’ve been there each time. It collects data from your phone, constantly if you have an Android, and if you have an iPhone, it logs your location every time you open the Google Maps app. Nothing disappears: your every movement is a collection of data points, fed into algorithms that use this information to do everything from alert you to traffic jams in your area to notify you when you’re running low on nappies for your newborn.

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between time and place and the body. I think there’s a certain precarity to the notion of flesh and blood and skin and the way we are accustomed to think of our bodies as containers. One thing I certainly have struggled with throughout my writing life is reckoning with the limitations of marshalling coherence into what is just blind emotion. I feel a certain way about my body, and I feel a certain way about how my skin and my flesh and my memories and time and place crash into and against one another; and the only thing I know to be true is my own inadequacy in the face of it all. James Baldwin once remarked that history, as no-one seems to know it, is not merely something to be read, and I think a corollary to this thought is that our bodies are not merely vessels to be read, and that the boundaries of our bodies are coterminous with our capacity to consider them. But here is what I know: there are some things that I remember and some things that I do not, and time as I experience it is not the same as time as it happened: I’ve shed far too many cells and memories and gained nothing in return for it except for some fading memories. Perhaps that’s what is so obscene to me about the idea of an app or website telling me things about myself that I know to be true.