But how to do feelings? All very well to write "She felt sad", or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things.

Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate.

When people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others.