I have no father. There's nothing unusual about that. Not long after I was born, I didn't have a mother, either. We lived in a house on a hill in Salts on the northern coast of Scotland. She fell down the hill and died.

"You're going to live with Pew in the Cape Wrath lighthouse," said Miss Pinch.

"You must be blind," I said to my new guardian.

"How did you guess?"

"I've read this sort of pretentious crap before."

"Let me tell you a story," he said, "a story that has no end."

"I was rather hoping it had no beginning, too."

Pick a date. Any date. 1811. That's the year Robert Stevenson completed the Bell Rock lighthouse. Take another year. 1802. See, the story doesn't really have a beginning. Josiah Dark came to Salts to supervise the building of the lighthouse. Robert Stevenson had a relative who wrote Treasure Island. The Pews have always been lighthouse keepers: Pew feels as if he has been there for ever. "I'm over 160 years old," he said nonchalantly. My dog nodded in understanding. See, everything can be interconnected if you're happy to write bollocks.

Tell me another story. Josiah had a son, Babel. By all accounts Babel was a happy man living in Bristol. Everyone thought he would marry his girlfriend Molly. But Molly got pregnant. Babel thought she had slept with another man and fled to Salts to become a pastor. He was not a happy man: he married a woman he did not love and hit her from time to time. He fled Salts for two months every year. No one knew where he went. In fact, he spent the time with Molly. He was so happy with her, he called himself Mr Lux in Bristol. Back in Salts he called himself Mr Dark. See, it's just like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ... Please stop. You promised there were no endings.

Pew got a letter saying the lighthouse was to be automated. I woke to find my dog rowing him out to sea. Pew was singing, "I'm gonna live for ever. I'm gonna learn how to fly." Tell me another story.

I went to Capri. I tried to steal a bird that talked to me. But I got caught. The end. Except there are no ends.

Tell me a story. The story of life. Dark found a cave full of fossils. Charles Darwin came to examine them. Could the world really have begun with the flood, thought Dark. The beginning. Deep.

Tell me a story about a story. I tried to read Death in Venice in the library. But the librarian took it home. I didn't want to buy a copy so I never got to finish it. The middle. Deeper.

And then I met you in Greece. We fell in love. I love you, I love you. We came back to the lighthouse. There was Pew and my dog. "We told you there were no endings," they chorused.

But thankfully there are.

The digested read ... digested

No beginnings, no middle and no endings, but you've still read it all before