You grow up being blasted with freezing air daily – on walks to the video shop, or through the poorly glazed window of a school bus that strangely stinks of ham, or in your hiding place behind the janitor’s house where you wait out another breaktime. This permafrost existence forms a habit for life, and you learn to live stooped. Climate affects how we hold ourselves; how we hold ourselves affects everything else. Here, Valentine’s Day is conducted in icy, huddled silence. Funfairs require your body to be wrapped in eight or nine layers of itchy woollen cladding, which restricts your movement to the point of uselessness; your only option to stand quite still and stare at the prizes you can’t win, transparent plastic eggs rotating in a Perspex box as a grotesque 1970s mechanical chicken cackles for coins. A day out to Millport is spent necking scalding-hot tea too fast from a thermal flask, while an elderly couple eye you with suspicion through rain-spattered spectacles, because they never did find out who stole that pen from Tourist Information in 1993. They grew up cold too.

You watch your own breath, in and out.

One July there is a good day, and you watch every adult you know go mad in the sun. An arid trash-strewn wasteland, covered in the exploded remains of the drunken sunburned, whose only crime was to overreach for a little of the birth-right confidence they were told to want, and whose messy failure to achieve it makes them crawl further into their shells.

In your early twenties you twitch the curtains, wondering if you really need to repeat these ingrained mistakes, or if years of slouched shivering and hemming life in can possibly be unlearned. On television a talking dog chatters inanely in shades about a new type of biscuit, and you hate him because he’s better than you.

You switch off, determined now to stop hiding away, to not give in to a life weighed down by thick blankets and bits of old eiderdown and a constant, inexplicable embarrassment. You squint closely into a handheld mirror, and can picture yourself as a presentable extra far in the background of a music video. You are still so young.

You go down the stairs, having to consciously drag your eyes up from the ground, forcing your confused spine into charm-school posture for the first time.

You try to swat away all the usual thoughts, of whether you remembered to switch this or that off, whether you’re carrying your keys, because of course you did and of course you are.

Nothing touches you now, and you are stunned by the notion that there are some people who feel this way all the time, who expect no less.

You turn the key, possessed, and walk out into the new life.

The sun is shining.

A child laughs.

More laughter.

You realise you are still dressed for bed, in decade-old phlegm-yellow sweat-stained long johns that cling to your doomed, overgrown form and bear the faded slogan ‘COME TO MY PAJAMA PARTY’ in a cheerfully wretched font. A hairy toe sticks through a hole you never got fixed.

A gathering crowd of camera-clicks and cruel, delighted shrieks reminds you why you should’ve been kept sealed in your original container.

You hurl yourself homewards through the front door, which closes for good.

- LJ