Julian Barnes

No, I mean, quite a lot of people are interested in awful things that happen or unexpected things that happen.

And I think it's a way of confirming that, you know, as I think the Russians have it, life is not a short walk across an open field.

There's always something waiting for you, coming out of the hedgerow at you.

So, I have a friend who's a consultant radiologist and who sends me clippings from the British Medical Journal.

And as you say, she knows that my interest tends towards the ghoulish and the extreme.

And so, you know, for example…

It's always men somehow who are doing this stuff, men who decide to grow their toenails to a length of several feet so that they're unable to walk.

And these examples like this, they usually have photographs with them so that they're sort of proven.

And then there's one case I particularly remember.

It was a man who'd been fitted with a tracheostomy tube.

And when he went for a checkup, the doctors were baffled by sort of yellowish stains around the hole into which the tube was fitted.

And it turned out that he was a desperate smoker who couldn't smoke through his mouth anymore.

But he discovered if he took out the tube, then the cigarette fitted perfectly into the hole.

And all he had to do was to light up and inflate his lungs.

You've got to be pretty clever and curious to come up with that way of smoking, it seems to me.

I find it fascinating, really.

Yes.

I mean, I find it fascinating until I know exactly what it is.

And then I might find it horrifying.

I was talking to a friend of mine who said, oh, I don't think about death.