Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Tom Stoppard are dead.

In a 2017 interview Tom Stoppard recalled the crowded solitude of his writer’s block: ‘ … there are so many things that ought to be written about, and could be written about, that the contents of my head appear to be mostly white noise, a buzz of all the possible things’. 

While not making any comparisons with the playwright, I can empathise. Stoppard: ‘I’m a bit oversensitive about the ideal conditions that I desire or require for doing proper work. They tend towards the extreme, isolation. It’s as though I need to be the only person in the house before I can completely let go of everything around me’.