“I always think flamingos are like bad actors” she said. We were walking through the zoo. It was hot. I was sunburnt. Old friends since our acting days, I laughed at her absurd truth. Pregnant again, and in cheerful, vaguely panicked denial, it seemed to drive home to me the curious fact that if she’s not careful in sex, there’s a risk of life – if I’m not careful, there’s a risk of death. Something seems unfair, but it’s not personal. But I don’t know quite what it is, if it’s not personal.

Like a magpie, she steals stories, but feels guilty about it. A woman she doesn’t really know at all splurged out her life story to her recently; about dealing with being bipolar and a danger to her kids when she’s high – not out of malice, just out of an awareness by the health authorities that the different reality she enters, when she stops taking her prophylaxis, her risk-protector, her medication, is not grounded enough to protect children, whose needs are very basic and practical. My friend put it straight into a story she’s writing, and admits to feeling strange, as if betraying a confessional code, that she’s not to be trusted. And I, in turn, put our conversation into this page. Neither, it seems, am I.

Trust changes gear when you’re a writer. Or, indeed, a counsellor. As someone who wears both hats, there are similarities. One ear is listening for a pulse that isn’t just personal, but is in some way universal, like sifting through a mythic genetic code. That ear records and remembers segments of the human story, those disconnected threads of experience. As a counsellor, I try and regurgitate them, and weave the chaotic threads into a coherent pattern - not to say it’s the only pattern, or the right pattern, but it’s something to work with, to alter, to protest against, to mourn, to celebrate. The client can look at it and judge for themselves if what they see reflected back feels comfortable, or if they want to weave their own meaning, their own story, from the pieces of life they’ve fired at me like pellets in a scattergun, consciously and unconsciously. As a counsellor, the work is just between two people, with the added reflective support of supervision, where one bounces off one’s experience of their story with another experienced counsellor, who helps to spot the potential dropped stitches.

As a writer, the process is somewhat similar, except the regurgitation is public. I don’t take directly those basic details from my clients that make their stories identifiable and unique. Unlike my friend, I have taken a vow of sorts as a confessor, as a counsellor; but the impact pattern remains in my memory, like those photographic records in science labs when photons have been fired in the dark, little dots and lines recording the brief existence of the tiniest building blocks of matter. Those shapes, those tiniest details, are both the building blocks of stories, and the gracenotes.

I want to encourage my friend not to feel guilty about putting another person’s confession into a story. It is only by telling and retelling stories that we can make sense of this disfunctional, confusing and challenging world. Life is consistently more bizarre, more mediocre, and more confusing than any novel or filmscript. If we’re lucky, we can find a golden thread through it that stops it from unravelling back into chaos.

My favourite person at the moment in this world is seven. He’s my neighbour’s elder son, and when I was over there recently I spotted a picture he’d drawn with the words: “Now that you’ve killed me ten times, I will be your friend”. I told his mum that that was amazing, that I’d love to have it for my wall. So, after school, there appeared at my door said seven-year-old reaching up to me offering the picture, seriously informing me that “killing means defeated”. “I see, thank you,” I said. And he was gone. He knows something about life, already. His faith that friendship follows defeat, or PlayStation death, comes from somewhere that I’ve forgotten, and am trying to remember.

Last week, on a brief visit back home to Dublin, I arrived with food poisoning fermenting in my stomach, a dodgy fried breakfast at Stansted, and within a few hours of arriving home (three hours late - Ryanair seem to be becoming more and more blasé about their flights being delayed) found myself with my mother’s hand holding on to my forehead as I spewed my guts up, not once, but twice, again a few hours later. I never thought I’d feel that hand on my forehead again; I was back to being seven again, when everything was going to be alright. That warm hand said so.

Before leaving the next morning for another (delayed) Ryanair flight, my eighty-year old Dad said “listen to this” at the breakfast table. He fiddled around with a tape recorder, and then found what he was looking for. A blackbird has taken charge of the trees in our garden this summer, and pours his heart out every day with the most lyrical swoops and dives and loop-the-loops of song; a sound that drives out all others, that is as bright as sunshine in a clear sky. My father played his recording of his song for me. Time stopped.