What is remembered: Albert.

There is an old man lives not far from me, I think, he often gets on my bus a couple of stops from mine, in his late sixties, maybe, could be seventies, it's hard to tell when people are as unkempt as he, walks with a zimmerframe, his grey hair uncut and so uncombed it has gone into dreadlocks at the back, not a wino but surely he lives alone, everything about him speaks of an old man living alone, teetering on the edges of coping with life. The very edges. There is a distinct, unpleasant, strong smell of stale urine he brings with him onto the bus. Several times, he has sat in the seat in front of mine, and I have watched the back muscles of the person he sits next to stiffen, as we all recoil from his odour.

I pick through my thoughts and feelings, I find things I don't like, I find myself thinking oh no, not again, not him, not all the way into town with that smell around us, around me, invading my nose, my space. I think of his life, his home. He must live somewhere. I can't imagine his home. I don't want to imagine his life, his shopping, his lone evenings and lone mornings and lone dinners, does he wash, does he wash his clothes, does he read a paper or listen to the radio or watch tv. Does anybody ever call on him, on the phone or visiting-wise. Was there ever anyone in his life, women, a woman, a wife. Children. A mother, surely. A childhood. Fifty years or so and it could be either one of my sons. You can never tell, can you, beforehand, who's going to land up being that ill-smelling barely-coping lonely old man. It could, in another twenty-five years or so, be me, except I'm not a man, but I understand the conditions of loneliness, of life itself becoming too much of a task to master, apply to women as well.

Once, almost twenty years ago, on my street in London, I came across another lonely old man. Less unkempt than the one now riding my buses he was, his hair neatly shorn, and no zimmerframe, although one might have been useful for him. I found him half-kneeling on Sydney Avenue, just off the North Circular, a worn shopping bag standing next to him, its half-open state revealing its contents, a small bottle of Scotch and two chocolate bars. He didn't ask for help, his look was not pleading, in fact, he looked like he'd just half-knelt on the pavement for a reason, but people don't, so I stopped and asked if he was alright. His smile was one of embarrassment. I don't think I can get up, he said. That's alright, I said, I'll help you, and I can't remember how we managed it, I think I just offered him my arm and he pulled himself up, leaning on me, but I do remember his frame, his bone structure, his skeleton, tangible through his clothes and his skin and his negligible flesh, like a big decrepit bird's. In spite of the Scotch, there was around him no whiff of alcohol, just a faint trace of the same stale urine odour of lonely old men. I had to say something, feign normalcy, help him over his embarrassment. I was twenty-one, twenty-two. My name's Anna, I said, what's yours? Albert, he breathed, and in the two syllables I thought I heard a life.

What is remembered: an encounter with an elephant

About thirty-five years ago, on a summer's day, I was out walking in a Helsinki park with my mother. I was small and still full of light and consequently skippy, skipping away on the gravel path, a few steps ahead of my mum.

Children live in a world of magical realism (and admittedly, I still do, painted over as I am rather thickly with a rational world-view, but scratch the surface and out comes seeing signs and meanings, and compulsive rituals, and so on), but magical realism or not, nothing in my previous experience had prepared me for what I saw as I rounded a corner, past som lilac bushes: an elephant, out for a walk. Big, grey, untethered, an elephant in a Helsinki park, accompanied by a man with a little twig, with which he tapped the elephant's leg now and then.

Not that we stayed to look for long, my mother and I. We stopped, we gasped, we turned, we ran. And here, dear Reader, is the juiciest bit of my memory: once we'd legged it back past the lilac bushes, we came across a gentleman, walking in the direction we'd just come from. I think he was smoking a pipe. Imagine me, gentle Reader - four years old or thereabouts, plaited hair and summer dress, trying to warn the gentleman with a pipe: "Don't go there, mister, there's an elephant there." Imagine too, if you will, first his ill-advised disbelief and disinterest in the make-believes and magical realisms of little girls, closely followed by his encounter with the said elephant - which encounter I, of course, never saw, as we were rather intent on not being trampled by the elephant, but which I very much like to imagine now, as an adult.

Our lives are linked to the lives of multitudes of others. It tickles me pink to think that somewhere in this city, there might still be alive an aging gentleman who has the other half of this memory - that of a little girl running to him, warning him of an elephant in a Helsinki park.

(PS There is a rational-world-view explanation to the encounter, in the form of the circus being in town. In those days, there were animals in circuses. And in parks.)

What is remembered: the young painter

In my mid-twenties, I became very sweet on, not to say fell in love with, a young painter, quite out of the blue. A friend of friends, Irish, tall, dark, handsome, soulful - let's call him Seamus. It may or may not be his real name.

I have always found some really rather peculiar things beautiful - in this instance, I mean just visually, although I am also deeply moved by other unusual oddities than those one can look at. At the time, I had never shared these thoughts with anyone at all, thinking they were so truly strange they would be met with mocking rather than understanding. I think what I really fell for in the young painter was that he, too, seemed to understand the inherent beauty in the empty stalk left over when a bunch of grapes has been eaten; or the fine network of veins, the only thing left of last year's almost-disintegrated autumn leaves; or the smooth, off-white, randomly-found tiny bones of forest creatures - mice, squirrels, what have you. The young painter painted these things - well, I'd still say - and I was sold, hook, line, and sinker.

I believe there was mutual attraction but it was impossible. My children were small and my marriage terribly unhappy. It may be the latter added weight and desperation to the feeling I developed for the young painter.

What is remembered: the walkman incident

When I was nineteen, I left Finland to go work in backpacker hostels in Athens.

The Iron Curtain divided Europe into distinct halves. The Berlin Wall was firmly up, and its crumbling demise two and a half years later was unthinkable.

I had bought myself the cheapest ticket - boat and train via The East Block. East Berlin was vast and freaky. Nobody wanted to talk to me in English, and my faltering German didn't entice a friendly response either. I know now why this was - being seen talking to a foreigner was not going to go down well with the Stasi.

Onboard the train from East Berlin to Hungary, my seat was in a compartment with a group of five or six East German students, about my age. One of the guys was chatty, the rest of them ignored me. His English was good, and he apologised for his friends - they don't like speaking English, he said. We talked about various things, this and that. He admired the Sony Walkman - second-hand, less than prime condition - someone had given me to entertain myself with during my four days' travel. I have one, he said, but I don't have it with me now. My girlfriend and I (she never looked at me once) saved for a year and a half for it. We are now saving to get one for her, he told me.

It took me about ten seconds to make the decision. Why don't you have mine, I said. No way, he said, I couldn't possibly. Yes way, I replied, or something very close to it. I got this one from a friend, and honestly, I can get another one if I really want one. I don't really care for them very much anyway. Please, I want you to have it. (Alright, he was quite nice-looking, but the real reason was I couldn't bear the difference between us, the saving for eighteen months for something I had been casually given by a random someone.)

He was over the moon. His girlfriend muttered a thank you without looking at me. He wanted to give me something in return, and searched through his stuff, mortified that he didn't really have anything to give. In the end he found a metal bottle-opener, with a naked boy á la Mannikin Piss on the handle. He was apologetic at the smallness of his gift. I kept it for years, decades, although it was hopeless for opening bottles - maybe it worked better on East European bottles, who knows. I know it turned up when I last packed up and left everything. I seriously hope I didn't ditch it, and that it is still somewhere amongst my packed-up junk.

What is remembered: a "guess he didn't actually fancy me" moment

So you're a single mum, this guy said to me once, I didn't know that. No wonder (name deleted) became so interested in you all of a sudden.

What do you mean, I asked, naively.

Because you're a single mum. Single mums put out, every time, he replied.

What is remembered: too ugly.

I was about nine, certainly not older than ten, when an older boy tripped me up in a dark downstairs corridor at school. My "myssy", or knitted woollen hat, fell off, and my rucksack went flying too. Flat on my tummy on the floor, I knew I was little, helpless, humiliated. He towered over me and said something I've never forgotten: "You're too ugly to be raped." He was twelve or thirteen, thereabouts. I went home, looked in the mirror, and addressed myself: "That's the way it is, Anna. You're too ugly to be raped. Just too ugly."

What is remembered: the marriage & the divorce.

Today would be my seventeenth wedding anniversary with my first husband.

We were young but not happy together. I was incredibly self-conscious and rather unhappy on our wedding day. He was embarrassed about doing as middle-classed a thing as getting married, and didn't want us to tell anyone. We went to the registrar's office in Enfield, and I got too drunk afterwards and felt embarrassed. We did go down to Bournemouth and the South Coast for a few days, though, and had a really nice time in the end. We stayed in a completely blue room with a view to the sea, ate a hot pot cooked in beer one night, and visited Avebury. I lost the film I took on the trip.

Ten years ago we were separating. He sent me the cover of a Guardian weekly pull-out section, featuring a Damian Hirst piece: a cow's (sheep's?) heart, pierced with a bread knife.

It is so good to be where I am in life.

What is remembered: the electric chair.

When I was six, I accidentally broke a branch from a tree in the back yard of my friend's block of flats. The other girls were aghast - "oh, oh, you mustn't do that, it's not allowed!" I was horrified, too, as I was an overly good girl, never naughty. I developed a terrifying fantasy about being put in an electric chair for my crime. I tried to fantasise my way out of this fate, too: I thought my mum could tell people I had died already. Whenever I would have to venture out, I could wear the wings of my Christmas pageant angel costume. Mum, I thought, would help me by cutting suitable wing apertures in my winter clothes. It did occur to me that grown-ups didn't usually believe in angels. I tried to console myself by thinking they would have to, when they saw my wings.

This worried me for a whole miserable winter season. It was my first experience of thinking myself way down a neurotic vortex. At the time, my mum was in hospital, recovering from neurotic depression.

What is remembered: Athens & Riga.

The other memorable character from Athens was an old man, his body twisted and bent in various directions, who used to walk around the main railway station, shouting in his old man's broken voice: "O-ro-lo-gia! O-ro-lo-gia-!" - watches. I feel a stab of bad conscience to think how we, teenage brats from welfare states, used to laugh at him. Afterwards, as an adult, I have thought of Greece's history, with all its wars - the number of amputees amongst the older folk of Athens was high, still in the 1980s - and of poverty, polio, various other possible reasons for the old man's twisted shape. I have also understood what made the man sell watches at the station - at the time I used to think if anyone wants a watch, they'll surely go to a department store. Now I've understood it is a step above begging, an attempt to keep up (the remnants of?) the self-esteem of an old man, poverty-sricken, unable to work, uncared for either by his family or the state.

Decades later, when visiting Riga, I saw various services being offered for a few coins in an underground tunnel (does Riga have an underground system? It may well have been just an underpass of some sort), including a woman who had a set of scales. For a few pennies, people on their way to work could weigh themselves on her scales. That set of scales was her living, her prize possession, the line between her and abject poverty and begging.

To me, the merchandise of these European poor seems meaningful, laden with symbolism: watches. Scales. Measure your time. Weigh yourself.

What is remembered: Athens.

From my six months in Athens as a young adult, two people and incidents strike me as memorable now. One was a tiny crooked lady who appeared at the Piraeus underground station one day. She was the colour of dust all over - hair, skin, clothes - wrinkled and extremely small. She walked right to the centre of the station, chucked down the dust-coloured sack she had been carrying, threw back her head, and shouted in a voice as broken as it was loud: "Sika freska sika! Sika freska sika!" - a fig seller.

I had never seen fresh figs; I had to go and get a closer look. Her sack was full of figs, deep purple in colour, dusty, onion-shaped. I bought a small paper bagful of them, out of curiosity, although I didn't know how to eat them. I don't remember how much she asked for the figs she had dragged on her back from God knows where. I believe it was ridiculously little, even when measured against my vanishingly small Athenian wages. Somehow I managed to peel the fig - with my fingers? With the Swiss Army knife which got lost in Athens but which I might still have had in my pocket then? In any case, the taste was delicious, the whole fruit out of this world, alien, from another planet.

What is remembered: Amsterdam, part 2.

In Amsterdam, we were out about town, although it was dark. We ate out, and Mum let me drink cola, although Dad complained. Milk in Holland tasted strange, or rather, behaved strangely. Faint blue-white streaky patterns floated atop it, reminiscent of an oil slick. I couldn't face drinking it.

We visited the Anne Frank Museum on Prinsengracht. My maternal gran had given me The Diary of Anne Frank the previous winter, and I had read it several times. Anne, the child murdered thirty years ago, felt like someone I knew; I admired her, fantasised about her life, her existence, our impossible friendship. Anne's Jewishness seemed exotic, touched by tragedy. In my mind, this made every Jewish person a romantic hero. To my knowledge, I knew no Jewish people. Mum had said that Siiva, a girl at the playground I used to go to, was Jewish. Siiva bit other children. Her Jewishness was not the same, to me, as Anne's, my imaginary friend's, ethereal otherness.

At my local swimming pool I met a girl who was sweet and beautiful and interesting, and whom I passionately had wanted to befriend. (This was probably later on, possibly during the winter following the Amsterdam holiday, possibly a year later.) She told me she went to the Jewish School in Helsinki. Wonder of wonders! Exotique, spirituality touched by otherness, and she was just as sweet and beautiful as my romantically heroic friend should be. I hoped to meet up with her again at the pool, but I never saw her again. I don't remember her name. It is thirty years ago.

The museum at Prinsengracht felt in part familiar from the book and the photographs included in it, and in part strange, "wrong", the way oft-fantasised places do when one visits them. Mum felt a claustrophobic angst and was in particular horrified by the fact that thirty years on, the place still carried a faint odour of urine - the Frank family hadn't been able to flush the toilets during office hours, it would've revealed their hiding place to the people working in the building.

One night out walking we came across a Holocaust memorial: metal slabs the size of doors, enclosing a circle the size of a smallish room. The gaps between the slabs became narrower and narrower until the nearly-eight-year-old me couldn't squeeze through. A searchlight swept the ring of metal slabs every few seconds. I played a game. I imagined I was at a concentration camp. If I could get behind the next slab before the searchlight hit me, the guards wouldn't notice me and I would be able to escape, I would be saved. If the light hit me, I would be shot. Eventually, I didn't make it. I felt strange. I wanted to change the rules of my game - "no, she wouldn't in fact die after all" - but on the other hand, I felt a sharp awareness of my game having been one where the rules could not be altered. This was how they had died - they hadn't made it out of the path of searchlights - and in other ways too.

My mum reminisced for years about how children played "innocently" at the memorial. I don't think she knew how seriously I played.

What is remembered: Amsterdam, part 1

(Yes, I am aware I nabbed the title from Alice B. Toklas's autobiography)

My first trip abroad was to Amsterdam. I remember my parents' astonished halt at the door of the hotel and myself peeking behind them. A narrow and tremendously steep staircase led upwards directly from the threshold; I had imagined an enormous hall. Our room was in the upper floors, full of beds sprung to bounciness, with sink-in mattresses and pillows. During the holiday, which was long (a whole week?), I often lay on my bed, and formulated a thought I still remember:

"Just to think...I am
In the Universe
On the Earth
In Europe
In Holland
In Amsterdam
In existence
Here."

I wondered, whether "in existence" should in fact be at the top of the list - is existence larger, more all-encompassing, than the universe? - but couldn't form a final opinion on the matter. I followed the curlicue patterns on the pink bedspread with my finger and experienced a delicious existential awareness. I would be eight in the autumn.