I got my first scar before I could make memories. I was three and my mother had purchased one of those table-edge clip-on chairs that were all the rage in the 1980s and which you can now no longer purchase because they’re so outrageously dangerous. One morning as mum was attaching me to the dining table she became distracted by the ringing of our phone. As she went to answer it, my chair removed itself, I plummeted towards the ground and caught my chin on the table’s edge, splitting it all the way around. Cue wailing, bleeding and my first stitches. That particular scar has grown with me over the intervening twenty-four years, expanding from the width of a baby’s chin to that of a full grown man’s. I can’t imagine the guilt and fear my mother must have felt as she heard the sickening thunk of my head crashing into the table edge behind her, but for me that scar has always been an immutable fact of my body, as natural as my fingers or toes, remarkable only for being a small expanse of flesh where no facial hair will grow. I may as well have been born with it, for all the consideration it has ever received.

My second came at the age of five and to this day remains the only scar I have received purely through my own stupidity. At the time there was a restaurant called Little Lebanon around the corner from our house, where the family semi-regularly ordered takeaway. I can’t remember what the food was like, but I do remember the place was clad floor and walls with large, bright yellow tiles, leaving diners with the peculiar sensation of enjoying their meal in the centre of the sun. There was also an expansive and similarly yellow three­ tiered fountain in one corner of the restaurant, taking up an area that could have happily accommodated another ten diners had the owners not been quite so committed to an interior water feature.