Julian Barnes

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.

I'm only 60.

I'll think about death when it's nearer the time.

And you think, well, death doesn't quite necessarily operate in that fashion.

You know, death could be an out-of-control motorbike coming around a corner and taking you out.