When you read about a car crash in which two or three youngsters are killed do you pause to dwell on the amount of love and treasure and patience parents poured into bodies no longer suitable for open caskets?

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority it is time to pause and reflect.

The world is a crazy beautiful ugly complicated place and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away that's when this stuff comes.

The principle of art is to pause not bypass.

Everyone takes pause at 40. It's the age you have to assess everything in your life. It's the fictitious marker that's always coming up when you're young. The world really does look at you to kind of have it together by 40 and be successful by 40. Whatever success means.