In 2015, whilst I was still getting over my 3rd breakdown. I went with my bosses on a company ski-trip. They were a lovely little company called White Spider Media. They used to take us away like a family. The ‘Dads’ of the company, Ian and Hugh loved skiing. The White Spider referred to a steep ice field that leads to the summit of the Eiger that the bosses had climbed when they were more-lively.

My days at that point, were often managing minute by minute revolving phantoms and terrors of my mind. Before my 3rd breakdown, I had been the ‘Head of Online’. I had left, and now I had come back but was working a couple of days a week. I don’t know how much they knew. I hid as much as I could. I had about three hours of concentration a day, and used to do as much work in that time as I could. I am thankful for their kindness.

We flew to Geneva. Then rented two fast German cars and drove to Val Torrens in France. The bosses drove like they were in Mission Impossible. They raced each other all the way. I held tight to the hand grip above the passenger window. This is a part of a car that I always look for. I relax when holding it. Car manufacturers invented this feature because they know, that passengers need something to hold onto, when they're driven by testosterone fuelled bosses, or alcoholic drink-driving parents. Gloria my stepmother used to hold this bar, and also bite her teeth on the seat-belt. I drive like a nana and take pride in it.

We set some kind of record getting to the the hotel. We get handed keys on keyrings that look like medieval maces. I am in room 2. I don’t have to share a room because I am over 40. The room is hot like an old people’s home. The window frames are thick and the glass triple glazed. The duvet is weighted with thickness I have never experienced. Outside the unopenable window, the skies are blue with a crisp clarity in the air that lets you see for miles.

Dinner that night is hot cheese and bottles and bottles of white wine. Even though I have taken drugs in my time and seen incredible hallucinations I have never seen a Racklette before. Pieces of melting cheese sliced off like beef and placed on top of potatoes, then on top of that, an Oeuf! It seems to me wonderous.

The hot cheese hits me and I get a drowsy head nodding feeling. From nowhere I am hit with a full cold in 30 seconds. Not the beginning of a cold, but a peak cold. I am feverish, sneezing, my throat hurts. It accelerates like my bosses driving. I have to apologise and leave the table. I feel so rough. One of the account managers offers me paracetamol, I take 3 of them.

I pull the duvet on top me. It is like being buried in heavy sand. I fall asleep immediately. I dream of a baby. A beautiful baby untouched by harm, by malice, by the accidents of life. I hold it. The next day I wake up with a miracle feeling. The cold has completely gone. A strange hope lives in my heart. There is an idea of a me that isn’t peppered like a target at a funfair. An idea of me that isn’t damaged beyond repair. The skin of the baby was without blemish. I touched the smoothness of its cheek in utter wonder.

I didn’t go skiing with the others that day. I sat on the sunny hotel terrace drinking coffee. I was at peace. I had no idea why.

But then I did. It hit me. I knew why I had broken down. I was growing up again.

When my son was four. A few days before he started kindergarten. I felt strange in a business meeting. It felt shifted in my perception. I couldn’t shake the feeling and I fell apart over the next few months. My son was the exact age I was, when my mother left my life.

I was growing up twice. Once with myself, and once again with my son. As he would grow up, so I would grow. At each stage, I would experience my feelings again. It was as if somewhere in my past, I had made a decision to be me, and I was not happy with the result. A boy inside of me wanted a second chance.

Then I reasoned, If my son grew up well, then I would also be well.

I was in the Pinnochio story!

My job wasn't only to make a real boy out of wood, it was to be real dad out of trauma.

Was I Gepetto?

But why here? Why on this works ski-trip? Then I remembered.

In 1978, my heartbroken mother took Thea and I skiing…

Les Angles 1978 - Age 5

If you are rich, you don’t go skiing at Les Angles. You go to Andorra where the snow is more certain. There is better skiing the higher you go in the Pyrenees.

My mother is the secretary to an Admiral in the naval attaché at the French Embassy in London. It is her first holiday with us since she lost custody of her children. We go to Les Angles. This is her land. She is French Catalan, born in Perpignan, where she lived until leaving for Paris in the late 60s. Her name is Colette. She has a gap between her teeth. She is a brunette Bridget Bardot but prettier.

High in the mountains, she cannot be touched by British law or British barristers. That is a good definition of a border, the point in space where no one else’s law can touch you. My father’s wealth cannot get her here. She can ski with her children for a couple of weeks before handing them back.

I’m four years old. I have spent an exciting and wakeful night rolling back and forth on a bunk-bed in a couchette on a 'Train de Nuit'. It travels from Paris to Perpignan in 10 hours. I think that we must have been somewhere at the back of the train, in second class, where the centrifugal forces that roll you about are stronger. Like you are the end of a whip.

We drive from Perpignan for what seems hours and stop in the skiing village of 'Les Angles'.

On my first day skiing, I keep falling down. I have been enrolled in a skiing class for ‘Les Poussin’. The skiing instructor doesn’t make me feel nice. When I fall he points at my ski poles with his ski poles. I must have still been tired from the train because after an hour and a half, I can’t get up again.

Leve-toi!

I lie on my back and squint at the sun. The other tiny people are now skiing. I am a useless baby. There is no strength in my arms and legs. The instructor lifts me and leans me on a snowbank to keep me out of the way. The sky is immaculate blue. The snow is brilliant white. The class ends.

Est-ce que tu te regale

Oui, Maman.

We all climb into a bright Orange Cable Car Egg and go back down from the mountain to the village.

I only spend one morning on the ski slope. When I wake up the next morning, I have been transformed. An emergency doctor is called and my mother has to call up her parents in Perpignan to come as soon as they can. Not that I could even see them because my eyelids are fused shut to my upper cheek. The doctor manages to open them, and I see through slits.

The Doctor's face looms in. He has silver hair that covers a huge bald head. He has a good look at my face.

Qu'est-ce-que c'est? My mother asks.

When he touches my cheek with his rough fingers I push his hand away.

‘Cest la cécité des Neiges.

I am snow-blind.

Il faut qu’il reste dedans. Protége-lui de la lumiere.

Dedans?!

Oui. Toute la semaine. Dans le Noir. C’est Important.

On a pas de chance. En?

The doctor shakes his head.

Pourquoi il a pas mis de lunettes de ski?

She doesn’t know why I wasn’t wearing goggles. I don’t know why I wasn’t wearing goggles.

My grandparents might as well have been called from another planet for all they mean to me. They enter an apartment that is quiet and dark. All the shutters have been shut like the place is empty in the off-season. I lie on the sofa.

My grandmother’s eyes are blue crystals. She studies me like I am seam on a dress she is working on. She decides I need to eat. Trouble is my mouth is fused into a permanent kiss.

I want to know what has happened to my face.

Je veux aller aux toilettes. Miroir.

My grandfather’s hands are countryside hands, he lifts me easily and takes me to the bathroom so I can look at myself.

I see myself. There are blisters all over my face. I don’t cry because the blisters are strange and fascinating. It’s like looking at roast beef cooking through an oven door.

At lunch, my grandmother tries to poke small strips of roast chicken into my pouting mouth. Eating is like posting large parcels into a letterbox. I can’t stop touching my blisters. My hands get slapped away all the time.

At the end of the week, my sister shows me her skiing medal. It is a metal snowflake. I am insane with envy. I would love to see it forgotten on the train, but I will see it on her dressing table for years to come.

My cheeks leave blood stains on the pillows of the couchette on the way home. We are handed over to Gloria and Mike at Victoria Station whilst it is still dark. At first, they take no notice. Then Gloria sees. Her dental training kicks in and she kneels and touches my cheek. She looks at my mother with fury.

These are deep scabs. Hair may never grow here. He will never shave. What did you do?

The thought of not shaving in the mirror like my dad is not a good thought.

You get them for two weeks. This is how you look after them?

My mother's eyes become shiny, she gives Thea and a hug and then me. She turns away before her tears fall.

My stomach gets the sickness.

We climb into my father’s white XJS and pull off so fast i feel it at the base of my spine. The leather smells like dung. It makes me feel sicker. I open the back window with my own chrome electric button. My sister does the same, and the petrol fumes of the Hammersmith Flyover fill the car.

I thought his face was covered in chocolate, says Gloria.

Merdi Colette says, my father.

She’s unfit, Gloria says.

Do they hate her because of my face? Merd means shit. Is it shit on my face? Is this my fault?

I puke up all over the back seat.

We pull over into a petrol station.

Tissues are got, and seats are cleaned. T-shirts are changed.

Gloria and Mike are nice about it. When we set off again, Gloria and Mike play a guessing game.

We’re going on holiday, they tell us. A proper holiday.

Thea and I have to guess where.

Gloria mimes throwing spears. My dad makes his lips big

Africa? Says Thea.

Not Africa, but close Gloria says.

My dad can’t help showing off.

Katanga my friends! We are going to BAR BAY DOS!!!

He lingers on each vowel like he really is black.

The XJS glides into Queen’s Crescent in Richmond. It pulls up outside a four-bedroom mock-Tudor home. Red bricks and reproduction beams made to look like the oaks of the Spanish Armada. The new car's leather smell now mingled with sick. I can’t wait to get out. I need to get to my toys and the air between Lego bricks (354/2873), some of which must contain air from when my mother still lived with us, maybe even her breath.

Four weeks later the scabs have gone, miracle baby skin has done its job. I forget all about it. Yet there, inside me the boy waits 40 years for the right moment to heal me.

When your parents divorce, there is a multiplication. The cell splits in two and a second world emerges from the first. A second house, a second mother, a second father.

The same is true of holidays. For me and my sister Thea, the number of 'family holidays' doubled. We were often bundled with baggage from one house to another. We move through the cell wall from one family to another. Our parents begin to compete, and the excitement of going on holiday is replaced with a feeling of guilt and dread of leaving one hurting parent and having to forget about them, then having to smile for the next parent and the next holiday. The more I think about it, it isn’t the family that splits. It’s me.

To my father, each new holiday is a challenge, an overcompensation, a chest-beating moment of paternity. An ape charge. He must outdo what we have experienced. He has to be the better parent.