What I have always liked about Brighton is its impersonality. Since the 18th century, people have come, used the place and gone home again.

The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.

I used to help my dad with a stall selling eggs when I was about 12. People were so hard up they would ask for one egg. But mostly no one came by at all. It was very demoralising.

Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness.

I hate to be treated as if I'm invisible. I get incensed when people talk across me or refuse to catch my eye in a restaurant or shop.

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.