Where on earth did this come from,

please? Well, I was recently dead, so...

Yeah, that'll do it.

No, this one, I mean...

So I had a couple of points of inspiration.

I think one was quite personal and one was quite public, I suppose.

The personal inspiration was the death of my father about 10 years ago.

Yes, and to your last point as well, the four of them, how do they handle it differently, the

big age gap as well wasn't there between him and his big age

gap yeah about sort of 10 12 years between him and David um and so he's very impressed by David and kind of you know remembers him as a formidable older brother but uh he he's not at all sure that this is a good thing that David is returning and mostly because he's seeing his parents completely torn apart by his His father absolutely sort of doesn't want anything to do with this, and his line is really, the dead are still dead, and you kind of can't muddy the line.

You can't start to think they're not, because you'll just hurt yourself.

You'll hurt everyone around you.

Whereas Elizabeth, Eddie's mum, is very...

She wants her son back, and she...

And she just wants to have what she's lost.

But she does go and see her dad.

How does the whole thing look?

Uh, okay.

So I, I often, um, I often actually start my writing day, particularly at the moment, um, uh, in the middle of the night, which sounds very strange, and I will explain.

I, I don't get out of bed, but I w- often if I'm in the middle of a project, I will wake up at four in the morning, and I will just be wide awake.

My, my mind will just be racing with thoughts about the book and what needs to happen and things that, you know, I might have stared at that, uh, those pages and that screen for, for hours the day before and not got any of this.

But at four in the morning, my mind will sort of say, "Right, time to get up, time to get moving." Um, and I will maybe chew this over for a few hours sometimes, um, and then, uh, hopefully get back to sleep.

Um, but when I wake up, I'm sort of-- Often I take notes at that time, and I, I will wake up and sort of, you know, have my coffee and sit down to write, and I will already sort of know the business of the day because my mind was good enough to have, um, woken me up and told me the business of the day, uh, at four in the morning.

[typewriter dings]