The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

Drink hard in your twenties and you’re a regular, fun guy. Keep drinking hard through your thirties and you start to separate yourself from fun, health and indeed other people. If you’re still doing it in your forties it’s probably because you have unresolved stresses and problems which you are clumsily and destructively self-medicating. Drinking hard into your fifties means that you’re blowing hot and cold on ever seeing your sixties.

thing for me in these days to think of ending my life. But, having been cooped-up so long in the Cellar, my Eye was soon distracted by the roads &d views to be Spyed out the coach-window. We travell’d to Windsor, wheere my Lord the Judge had Stabling-rights, &d at an Inne we lunched upon Capons &d Beere, the Grinning Man watching me the while as if he feared I might give him the Slip at any time. For indeed the Streetes of this town, &d the Fine Castle, looked so Fair in my eyes that it seemed to me the Celestial Citie, &d I imagined I might live happy heere, e’en if only to bed me down on the streets. But at night I was lodg’d with the Grinning man, who tho he touched me not, yet he never left off Looking at me. When I fell asleep he was watching me, &d as I awoke

Behind me, a driver took time out of his evidently busy day to lower his window and abuse me in inventive, anatomically descriptive language.

Quite a lot of your biological architecture is about maintaining your body at that temperature, because a sustained period at five degrees above or below it will kill you. Imagine time is like that.

‘You’re yanking my chain.’ ‘No chains were harmed in the making of my previous statement.’