Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is a pity because this week the National Association of Beholders wrote to tell me that I've got a face like a rucksack full of dented bells.

I'm not some anti-technology person. I think it's often how people would assume that if they don't know me.

"Be Right Back," in which Hayley Atwell brings Domhnall Gleeson back from the dead using his social-media profile, sprang out of an unrelated conversation. Other stories you thrash away at for weeks and weeks.

The difference between smartphones and cigarettes is this: a cigarette robs 10 minutes from your lifespan, but at least has the decency to wait and withdraw all that time in bulk as you near the end of your life - whereas a smartphone steals your time in the present moment, by degrees. Five minutes here. Five minutes there. Then you look up and you're 85 years old.

I would say the thing you can still see in Black Mirror is that I was probably traumatized by the specter of nuclear war. I was born in 1971, and in the '80s I came to understand that I was inevitably going to be frazzled to death in the nuclear apocalypse.

While I was thinking about that, the military, I read a book called On Killing, about the obstacles people have to pulling the trigger in combat. So sometimes you just absorb all this stuff without realizing you were doing research.

Your grades are not your destiny: they're just letters and numbers which rate how well you performed in one artificial arena, once.