I admit to being prone to deep thinking, which – given that I’m emerging from dark times – can take me to some very sombre or profound places. But this is no bad thing. I always resurface wiser and with a way of viewing things that is different to before.

I needed some space to lay myself out, so that I could decide which pieces I wanted to pick up.

I’m a classic eccentric, living at the extremes of high mania and low mood. There’s no middle ground, only madness and sadness.

The ever-increasing weight of responsibilities that enmeshes our lives keeps us locked into the system. We become the pulse that keeps the beast alive, but the cost is our own lives. The natural world around us shrinks, crushed beneath the suffocating might of work.

Most of us, at some time or other, get sucked into the lifeless vacuum of work; the cogs of the corporate machine that we keep turning until one day, when we depart this Earth, we may earn the word ‘lubricant’ on our headstone.

There comes a time when you just have to say, “No!” – to the requests and to the system.