My cousin had a family tree drawn up. This is what people do in concrete towns where families outnumber forests. And perhaps a family is like a tree, all those connected people rooted to the ground – a safe shelter or a dead weight of meaningless lumber, depending on how you look at it.

On the paternal side our family came from Riga in Latvia. Our ancestor jumped ship in Cardiff and started up a Welsh branch there. He was a stevedore, apparently, with flat Latvian cheeks and thick, peasant calves and forearms, or so I imagine, since he bestowed them so liberally among his descendents. My mother saw a television programme once where the camera panned the streets of Riga, and she claims to have jumped out of her seat in surprise, thinking that she saw her own children there. And meanwhile she was waiting for her own genteel, Irish-inflected branch to bud and grow and bud again until it produced herself. There was red hair and Catholicism and a weakness for alcohol in that arboreal segment. My great-great grandmother had a reputation on the Holloway Road for driving drunk in charge of a pony and trap, with her flame-coloured hair flying out behind her. She was a cousin of the poet Yeats, and died of drink in her thirties leaving nine children to tell the tale. At last the Latvian link met the red-haired tendency and produced the childhood I recall with the usual mixed feelings, seeing nothing of its genetic determinism, only the blinding knowledge of individuality that was refracted through siblings and parents and grandparents, so that we all seemed to be looking at the same thing, only from different angles. Blood relationship is not the same as friendship, or love. In friendship the common object is the world. A family is a community whose common object is the self, only not the same self.