That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.

The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.