It’s 2024 and I may be the last person on Earth to watch The Walking Dead. What a loser! | Zoe Williams

I I never watched The Walking Dead when it first aired in 2010 because I thought I didn’t like zombies. Then I had an intern kid who was right about almost everything and told me to watch it. She didn’t even say that, just that she was sad for me for not watching it. It turns out my first three zombies (Shaun of the Dead, Zombies, World War Z) were just the wrong zombies.

So now it’s 2024, I’m the last person in the world to have watched The Walking Dead, I just want to talk about the zombie story and character arc and everyone else is sick of it. How come we haven’t even got the basics of zombies down yet? Do they prefer to live indoors or outdoors? What do they taste like? If there is a solidarity between zombies, which there must be if they’re all going in the same direction, are they sad when other zombies die? If zombies can’t die naturally, presumably they can’t starve; then why are they always so hungry? If their blood is also poisonous, why isn’t it a bigger problem if it splashes all over you? How come in seasons one through three they were incredibly hard to kill and in season eight you could just stick a twig in their ear and everything was perfect? ​​How incredibly lucky is Andrew Lincoln?

It messes with my peripheral vision, so that when I pass a thin person with an uneven gait, I look for something sharp. It turns out my brother was similarly obsessed, but took a different direction, and for a long time, whenever he got to somewhere, he started examining it for post-apocalyptic suitability. But he’s a regular speed adaptor, so that was years ago; he can’t remember most of it, just that he decided a place in Devon was good for an independent water supply, but less good for looting, unless you were in dire need of some antiques. And while he’s reasonably happy to talk about it and the wider zombie universe, it’s not all he wants to talk. So he’s useless to me. The moral of the story is to look at things at the same time as everyone else.

Zoe Williams is a columnist at the Guardian