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Once upon a life: Ali Smith

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Looking back on her life, writer Ali Smith returns to the moment of conception to weave a poignant and funny memoir of an irreverent father, a weakness for Greek musicals and a fateful border crossing

December 1961: I am conceived! And I don't remember a thing about it. I'm even having to guess what day of the week it is: a Monday, a Tuesday, a Wednesday, who knows, though it's probably more likely to be a couple of weekends before Christmas, but even so God knows how it comes about since there are two brothers and two sisters already out there over the border none of us remembers crossing, between not here and here, and I'm pretty sure nobody was planning on me since they were all born one year apart, and my nearest brother is now six, and my mother, all through my childhood, will refer to me laughingly as her surprise, and my father, nearly 50 years later when he's in his mid-80s and not long for this world, will tell me they were glad after all that they'd had a late child. It kept us young.

But that's not for ages, that's 48 years later; right now it's not that long since my mother persuaded my father to give up smoking and become a Catholic (which is quite a double whammy); it's dark, they're probably in their bed in our house at 92 St Valery, in Inverness, Scotland, one of the new council houses running along the back of the Caledonian Canal, a house they were lucky enough to get after the war, which my dad apparently pulled off by giving one of my (very small) sisters a good nip in the leg when he and my mother were called through for their tenancy interview, making my sister cry furiously throughout, making the council people keen to give them a house just to get rid of them.

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