1977 was also, of course, the year that Derek Jarman made his iconoclastic film Jubilee, which was so much part of the punk movement.

People may wish to say that the thing that is in conflict with my creativity is not Buddhism - that's fine.

Lots of things were there [in the seventies], in the social experience, but not quite named, lurking like a stranger on the edge of the playground.

Speaking of [Philip] Larkin, in his poem about the First World War he wrote something like, "Never such innocence, before or since, that turned itself to past without a word".

I feel that Nagai Kafu was a writer who cold stitch together apparently meaningless moments like these into a lyrical whole, and has enhanced my ability to do the same with my own life.

I began researching and writing what I intended as a book-length essay entitled Fascination and Liberation, exploring the question of whether there is a conflict between creativity and the Eastern form of enlightenment. I don't know if I'll ever finish that essay, because I had an experience, after I'd written two or three chapters, in which it seemed to me that my psychic antibodies decisively rejected Buddhism. Interestingly, the rejection felt as if it happened in Zen terms.

I don't want to give too much away, but something horrible happens in 1977. That was also the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee. I remember this jubilee. I remember receiving a commemorative coin from the school. I think it was a fifty pence piece. That was its monetary value, but it was not a normal fifty pence piece, and it would have been strange to try and use it in a shop.