I never seem to find what I'm looking for, though. I suppose I feel, these days, too aware of schedules and things, to let myself get lost in the rain. Anyway, I came back home, and it was still raining, and as I was approaching the driveway of the house, and the front garden with its bushy flower bed, I caught a cooking smell from somewhere on the air. I don't know why, exactly, but it appealed to me as a Nagai Kafu moment.

Anyway, to cut off one's biological dreams seems to me the most fundamental form of psychic castration that you could imagine.

I grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.

Western progress (from one damned thing to another) seems to be essentially the MO of nowhere fast. But, on the other hand, the don't-set-foot-outside-your-own-village/cave ideal or injunction that you find in Buddhism and even in the Daoism of which I'm fonder, seems . . . defeatist. And more than that, it is in contradiction to what nature actually does. Somewhere, somehow, I feel as if these two opposing principles have to be reconciled.

I think the seventies caught the last red rays of the dying sun of this innocence, but were already a little cold and drab.

I was in just the right generation to have taken feminism seriously by osmosis - also the generation when the breakdown of the family really began and for whom The Smiths were something new and essential.

I'm more a dog person than a cat person.