I enjoy doing very high mileages, partly out of masochism and also because I like to feel the shape of the landscape.

The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile.

Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft.

In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope for.

So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal.

Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.