17TH January I am very hungry. That’s what it means to m e mostly. Everything else is secondary. Or at least it is possible to forget. When you are the only one around appearances stop mattering so much. There are mirrors, but these do not tell me anything knew. Oh is that your face? Well yes. It has been for awhile.

I liked to stand upon the deck before a battle. That wasn’t technically disallowed, but often captains tended to disapprove of it; HMS Antigone usually at full speed hit around sixty knots, and she was a new, powerful, untrustworthy sort of strider, thirty metres high and without much space on her foredeck, and it wouldn’t really have done for her pilot to get knocked overboard, would it?

I tried as hard as I could to save them. You understand, that was the urge they’d given me – they had filled me with the right kind of chemicals and given me the meat to match, and told me to go ou…