Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.

I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.

It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that. But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we'd understood that back then-who knows?-maybe we'd have kept a tighter hold of one another.

I think it's quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.