And the daftness of things —that was keeping me awake too. You must have experienced one of those moments when life seems limitlessly absurd? Especially with your current sentence of death hanging over you. I find they come most often with me when I am looking from the window of a moving car or train. You catch sight of something perfectly ordinary, such as it might be bluebells nodding on an embankment, or a family picnicking in a lay-by, and suddenly your mind can no longer support the notion of a whole world full of life and objects and fellow-humans. The very idea of a universe appears monstrous and you become unable to participate. What on earth does that tree think it is up to? Why is that heap of gravel sitting there so patiently? What am I doing, staring out of a window? Why are all these molecules of glass hanging together so as to allow me to look through them? The moment passes, of course, and we return to the proper realm of our dull thoughts and our duller newspapers: in less than a second we are part of the world again, ready to be irritated into apoplexy by the stupidity of a government minister or lured into caring about some asinine new movement in conceptual art; once again we become a part of the great compost heap. Our absence is so fleeting and our control over it so negligible that an act of will cannot reproduce the experience.