It's a question I often ask myself: what would I do with me? And I don't know the answer. I don't know what I'd do, except run away.

I don't know, Alexander, sometimes it gets so bad you can't think of nothing better to do than make it worse.

For a moment, I believe, there was a stillness. A shocking realization by all things - beetles, dormice, the spiders spinning their webs in the moonlight, even the hot metal of the tracks and the wind in the trees - that Death had just shrieked past like a stinking black eagle and made off with a remarkable man.