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.

And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light.

Every great moment of social change was once a confirmed impossibility. People's determination in the face of overwhelming odds has, time and again, triumphed over what seems impossible. This is what you tell yourself.

Being afreaid proves you're alive and awake.

If we love the sea as much as we claim to we'll do everything we possibly can to keep it healthy. Otherwise we might as well take up golf.

Ah, but you, Darkness, you know all this. I tell you night after night. Nothing will shock you. Maybe I go on at you in the hope that there's something beyond you. Some nights I sit here and talk and sob and stare out into the blackness thinking that if I look hard enough I'll see the light behind. But I stay out until the break of day, waiting, hoping, and there's only sunrise again.

And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you.