I would like to disagree with the Buddhists and say that the absence of desire is a horrible thing. In support of this claim I will describe an encounter with it from a number of years ago.

December 2004 , Northern Sudan, some days before Christmas
I arrive in Dongola after six days cycling on a dirt road which runs beside the Nile and at times has trouble imprinting itself on the plain of glittering gibbers which stretches out on either side. I am not especially fit and have been permanently dehydrated throughout the trip: also, at some point in this six days I have succumbed to the ubiquitous fiction that the Nile water of northern Sudan is the 'best in the world', and drunk from the river. Somebody has given me a kilogram of dusty dates from their store and it's hard to tell if the culprit is the dates or the water, but I am quickly losing the will to live and am feeling a creeping malaise which seems to originate in my stomach. When I arrive in Dongola and feel bitumen under my wheels I start to cry with relief.

I stay in Dongola for three days. In this time I meet Marcin, his friend Anka and two Czechs all travelling together in a mobile new democracy whose decision-making process seems to me like a good argument for dictatorship. He gives me some medicine for intestinal parasites and I am charmed by his accent, his scarf, his black rimmed glasses which, I will discover later, can only be worn in circumstances where peripheral vision is not required. He is very nice and this encounter will change my life, but it is not a matter of immediate concern to me.

What I really want is my appetite back. And it comes, slowly, in increments, as I revive. On the first day, I eat a piece of fish. The parasites revolt. They want green apple fanta and cake. They punish me for the rest of the day. On the second day I manage two meals by placating them with heavily sugared tea. But it is not until the fourth day that I am really hungry again.

It's difficult to explain the quality of the feeling of wellbeing which the desire for food creates in me. I leave Dongola with a packet of bread, some cheese and a couple of tomatoes: enough to last me a day or so. By 11:00 I have already had five meals, stopping to scoff sandwiches in patches of shade beside roadside hits and wells, under a tree at the periphery of a cornfield, between the crumbling mud walls of towns abandoned to the flooding river . There is a metallic smell of earth and vegetation coming off the alluvial flats in waves where the sun hits them, reminding me of the market garden my parents had when I was a child.

For this day, I don't think of love (following me at a distance in its black glasses and scarf), or literature, or the future. It is enough for me to feel this hunger, which tells me that I am alive.