Being an Other.

Something unusual is going on. I feel unaccountably cold tonight, even though the thermometer in the room tells me that the temperature is perfectly reasonable. The computer is behaving unaccountably oddly. The fan heater in my office is behaving unaccountably oddly. People to whom I’ve written, and from whom I would normally have received a reply, are unaccountably silent. I fell asleep at my computer for an unaccountably long time. And there’s that strange, unaccountable smell of old cooking fat in the air. How do I know I haven’t died?

‘Well,’ you might reasonably offer, ‘if you’d died you would see your body lying unaccountably inert somewhere.’

Would I? How can I know? Maybe it doesn’t work that way. The ghosts in The Others didn’t know they were dead, did they? That was the whole point of the story.

So now I’m curious to see whether this post will appear on my blog if I publish it. If it doesn’t there will be no point in repeating the exercise. If it does I’ll feel silly, even though it is not unreasonable to speculate that if I've become a ghost, my computer might have done likewise. Feel free to judge as you will.