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My earliest memory is of me lying in my pram and looking up at my mum lighting a cigarette. My dad used to hate the smell of smoke in the flat, so whenever my mum felt the need to have a fag she'd have to go outside, and quite often she'd stick me in the pram and take me with her. I've been told since that this can't have been my first memory since I was too young at the time to form proper memories, and that I must have created it through pictures and associations. That would make sense, given how whenever I think of my mum the first thing that comes to mind is her holding a cigarette, but then the things that happened that day might have been enough to sear the memory into my underdeveloped brain.

My mum used to smoke Silk Cut. We lived on a small estate near Finsbury Park station and there was a newsagents nearby on Seven Sisters Road where she used to buy all her packs from. The people behind the counter got to know her from so many frequent visits that often they wouldn't even exchange words – she'd go in, they'd take a pack off the shelves, she'd give them the money, they'd give her the change, she'd walk out on to the street and instantly light up. Like I say, my dad hated it but I think he'd given up the battle in terms of getting her to quit way before I was born. I don't know if her smoking while pregnant with me had any affect on me or not. I'm kind of short, but then most of my family are. I don't think I'm any worse off than any of my friends, but how can you really tell?

It could've gone either way with me. I might have seen her hacking up half a lung every morning, might have associated that smell of stale smoke with cloying and sickness, might have started paying attention to the ever-present warnings on the packets, but instead, after her death, I found all those things a comfort. I started off with Silk Cut, stealing the occasional one from her handbag while she was still alive. Pretty quickly, though, I found that, for both financial and aesthetic reasons, I preferred roll-ups. Drum Gold, that was my brand. I loved the challenge of learning how to roll, and the subsequent exhilaration of the ritual. Take a pinch. Tease it apart. Move the thumb and fingers in well-practised motions to shape the whole thing into a tight cylinder. Place just the right amount of saliva on the tongue and then run it across the last edge of the paper to seal it down. Then light, inhale, and enjoy. I remember my dad's face when he first saw me smoke and realised that he'd lost another battle. He didn't even get angry; just sighed and turned his back on me.

I live now in a flat in Balham and my housemate has a similar attitude to smoking as my dad did. Thankfully we have a balcony, so I can smoke outside in relative comfort. I was the last of my generation to enjoy the privilege of smoking inside. Now I guess all smokers feel like my mum did twenty years ago. Forced outside to shudder in the wind.

The other day I saw a woman pushing a pram down the road, towards my flat. One of my favourite parts of finishing a cigarette is taking the butt-end between my middle-finger and thumb and flicking it away. I've become so practised at this that I can now hit a target from at least ten paces, wind permitting. I've used this skill many times outside pubs to show off or win a bet. I don't know why I'm so accurate with it. Just natural ability, I guess. Anyway, this woman was pushing the pram down the street, and I could hear her talking those random stupid sounds that mothers coo to their babies. Without realising it, my left hand rose to my forehead and rubbed the mark in the centre of it as I took the cigarette between the thumb and middle-finger of my right hand and waited.

Because the reason I think that my first memory is legit and not some assimilated fabrication is that on that occasion it was really windy and just after my mum lit her cigarette a gust of wind caught her hand and made her spill the lit cigarette into the pram and onto my forehead. And pain can be a powerful memory aid. It burnt and singed and scarred a mark into my forehead, and as I stood on my balcony and flicked my cigarette and watched it arc perfectly away and down and into the pram and heard mother and baby scream and looked down to see a glowing mark in the middle of the baby's forehead I smiled because I knew that now there was someone else out there like me.