Explaining my absence: just your typical first-world problems
‘I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you’re just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions]…really, it’s not about you.’ Iain Banks, in his final Guardian interview, published 15 June 2013 ‘I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death.’ Christopher Hitchens, ‘Mortality’ This will, no doubt, soon turn into a bit of the theatre of absurd. I’m not that old, but I always feel it. Hypochondria also runs in the family blood, mainly from my father’s side. The slightest niggle or pain, and we’re suddenly dying....