He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.

It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.

If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began.

But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.

My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It's that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana's don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that's different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn't work. Sorry about that.

If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be rhubarb fool, which I make with ginger and a hint of elderflower cordial.

This intimacy is not necessary; no one is compelling me to open my inmost self and lay it naked, undefended, against that of another – merely for the joy of the communion.