I feel like the seventies was a decade where things ran out, and where other things set in. There was just a lurking graininess and seediness about the decade, a slight grogginess of the hangover from the sixties.

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.

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 don't believe in sexual love.

If future history is not to be just one damned thing after another in space, then what we really have to do is in some way overcome this linear experience of time that makes all existence a quest for something that will never be found.And philosophies such as Zen seem to hint that this is possible.

This is the strange thing about existing in time. As [Philip] Larkin puts it, "truly, though our element is time, we are not used to the strange perspectives open at each moment of our lives" - something like that.

Zen, on the other hand, is not so dogmatically sterile, though there are certainly traces and more than traces of this austerity. However, with Zen we have not only the void, but the fertile void. The ink lines in a sumi-e painting show this fertility of the void ever ready to brim over into existence.