I had a Masters of Fine Arts, but so did thousands of other graduates every year, and we were all competing for the same jobs. I realistically didn't expect to become a teacher, and after two or three years, I accepted defeat.

If I had a normal life Id quite cheerfully go mad and fall over right now

I've tried over the years all kinds of ways of going about writing and even just thinking about the idea of writing. There was a time when I decided to try to write a song each day. Whether it was good or bad wasn't important.

I'm interested in that way we perceive things, and that was part of what I was getting into in painting - the idea of perception and how information goes through our heads and it comes out another way.

That's something that seems to happen when I'm writing, where maybe things that don't necessarily make a lot of logical sense are put together, and yet we struggle to make sense of these things somehow. I'm not quite sure why that is; it's something about human nature, I guess.

I had stopped painting around 2000, which I guess was when the music thing started getting pretty busy. I just didn't have enough time to pursue it properly.

I was studying sculpture and painting and was working on a degree so I could become a teacher. I really liked teaching, and it was something I was pursuing when I got out of school.