I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.

I have written millions of words about contemporary England - in journalism. Why don't I take it as the background for a novel? I may do one day. But the simple answer is that it does not excite the novelistic part of my brain; it does not fire it up.

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.

You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.

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.

Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us.