No reader will be unfamiliar with a visitor who, without warning, may perch on the side of our bed in the small hours. The Stranger is faceless and nameless but we all know him. I call him Anxiety. Edward Lear called him the Morbids. Churchill, the Black Dog. You may have another name for the intruder but all of us (even the least depressive, like me) recognise a kind of terror that can all but overwhelm us in a sleepless hour before dawn.
Typical of the Stranger’s visit is that we swim into wakefulness with something in particular troubling us: something we ought to have done or shouldn’t have done; someone to whom we were unintentionally rude, or who was gratuitously rude to us; a