From Scottish Review of Books:

I'm interested in people's vulnerability and what they do with it.
Some people can turn it into a weapon; some use it as a survival tool.
Ultimate vulnerability, the fact of approaching death, can make some
people's clarity, their vision or purpose, rise to be more than they
ever imagined before. Some people have no idea that their vulnerability
is a gift, and they wither away and die without ever having grasped a
sense of meaning at all.

I'm interested in the visceral. I get sick of artists or celebrities
being talked about as if they are somehow not "normal". [They] have to
find the answer to the same quesitons, in the end. It's not financial
or sexual success or, indeed, excess, that defines us at all: it's our
common weakness and how we attempt to rise beyond it – how we reach out
to others rather than how we separate from them – that seems to me to be
what is most engrossing. What is most moving and telling about a human
being.

Now the gap between aspiration and comic human reality is absurd, but
also heroic. That we keep bashing on. We are meagre, oozy, monkeys
with ideas above our ability, but we still reach.

Adrian Sie
Locum Consultant in Paediatrics
Royal Alexandra Hospital
Paisley
PA2 9PN