Recently I watched a lot of my blood leave me. It flooded out like a river that’s just had the dam gates opened. 

I wondered I was still going to be conscious when it stopped. There was no particular reason why I shouldn’t die, under the circumstances as I understood them.

But blood loss does interesting things to your state of mind. If you lose a little, you can get quite light-headed and silly. If you lose a lot, you go past the hilarity of it and get a kind of dispassionate clarity. I set about doing things to make sure I didn’t die, and got to a hospital, where they stopped the flow, closed the holes and pumped plasma into my veins.

I spent a couple of days in bed.