Today I had received an indirect threat of murder, delivered by someone I barely knew, on behalf of someone I did not know at all. It seemed absurd.

The world you live in goes on around you in the same old way. Why should it not?

The threat only gains weight if you start believing in it, or if the people around you believe it. What, for instance, would Jo have to say about it? We could laugh it off together, as we often did about other things, small or large. Jo was my sanity resource. On the other hand, she sometimes took matters more seriously than I did. I take nothing for granted with Jo.

Would I still think it absurd if one day I noticed a disagreeable looking stranger with a gun or a knife or a club, clambering up the flight of steps from the road, striding through the trees and across the garden towards me, his manner single-minded and deadly? Would that be how this revenge was going to be taken? Somehow it still did not seem likely.

Or maybe a surprise attack? Someone who broke into my house earlier and was hiding as I came home late at night. A gunshot in the dark, a sudden clubbing with a baseball bat, a knife in the back?

I realized then that I was adumbrating the scene as if it was part of something I might write. The fallback position of every writer: events are useful, experience can fill in a plot, waste not, want not.

I would in fact write it differently. For me, a properly imagined murder would be prepared by deliberate imprecision. The victim would be in a strange place, feeling extra vulnerable. There would be the unknowable social conventions, possibly the language, the weather, the look of the people and the appearance of the buildings. The victim would already be disoriented by the sense of foreignness, isolation. Then by blurring, darkening or making the surroundings mysterious, by not describing motives, by having the threats less clearly uttered, all to misdirect the reader. False alarms, or real warnings? Techniques of delay or surprise or error to heighten the tension, in this imagined world, the one I would make up.