I always got a bit pissed off with those broadsheet sceptics who make their living being passionately angry about homeopathy, God, synchronicity or whatever, because it's as if they can't get past their emotions, and in their rage they become as faith-driven as the beliefs they criticise. I always said they give scientists a bad name. After all, science has to be about asking unthinkable questions, not closing down debate.

If something wants to be a story, it will be.

Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.

So if we're all quarks and electrons ..." he begins. What?" We could make love and it would be nothing more than quarks and electrons rubbing together." Better than that," I say. "Nothing really 'rubs together' in the microscopic world. Matter never really touches other matter, so we could make love without any of our atoms touching at all. Remember that electrons sit on the outside of atoms, repelling other electrons. So we could make love and actually repel each other at the same time.

I erased the thought from my mind, but I couldn't undo the fact that I'd had the thought in the first place.

Sometimes you have to trust grownups, perhaps more so when they are not there to actually supervise you.

In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.