I seem to be less depressed but also less hopeful now in my thirties. My widow's peak bothers me. I think a lot about the end of the human race. And so on.

I'm more a dog person than a cat person.

Anyway, to cut off one's biological dreams seems to me the most fundamental form of psychic castration that you could imagine.

The quality of that 'who I am', is what I hope comes out in the writing.

I think there's a good case for antinatalism. Stephen Hawking has told us recently that we must colonise space to survive, not long after telling us to beware of aliens because they'll probably just do to us as the conquistadors did to the native peoples of the Americas. So . . . exactly why do we want to go on and on, to go forth and multiply in a hostile final frontier? Why?

I think I'm probably too close to the seventies to be able to analyse them (it?) effectively.

I'm not sure if there is a cultural loss of innocence specifically associated with the seventies. The oil crisis? The Watergate scandal? I really don't know. There's nothing there on the scale of Hiroshima.