It's sadness coming on like the old days, the vast seamless hopeless weight of sadness looking for a place to rest.

Different tenses and perspectives offer you different things. It helps to distinguish the world that they are in.

Who wants to be reputable? That's for golfers and tycoons with a sleazy past.

People do change - individuals, families, nations - and the pace of transformation need not be geological.

Humour is God's special gift to humanity. Handy, because it turns out to be necessary.

Hunting and gathering are in my blood. But I've lived long enough to witness a diminution in the seas, and to notice a fragility where once I saw - or assumed - an endless bounty.

I've been a writer and a parent since adolescence, it feels like, and I'm still making both gigs up as I go along. I did both in different forms of isolation - too young by conventional standards, too far off-grid culturally and geographically. So my experience is probably too specific to be useful. None of us do this stuff the same way. We just try to endure and press on, I guess.