One of the reasons people get irritated with me is my incurable flippancy. Everything’s a joke to you, they sooner or later say, you can’t be serious about anything. Which, I think, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of humour. There’s a sort of cuttlefish, so they tell me. When it’s chased by a shark or whatever, it squirts ink in its eyes and dashes for cover. For ink, read joke. The whole world scares me. A lot of the time, even thinking about who’s coming for me next makes me ill with fear. So, because I assume everything and everybody is hostile, I spend my life behind a
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