In terms of what is expressed, antinatalism is a strong presence, not always explicit, in what I write.

I think I still have [commemorative coin ] somewhere. Why was this given to me? I think every child in the country must have received one [ from Queen's Silver Jubilee]. That's the last time that I recall something of an innocent, more-or-less unquestioning monarchist patriotism in Britain.

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.

People didn't talk about paedophiles in the seventies, I don't think.

[My muse] is, in fact, a woman of the world, and precisely because of this, hopes that a diversity of cultures will endure, and that one bland monoculture does not swamp everything.

If you look at the ox-herding pictures - specifically the newer set of ten pictures rather than the older set of eight - you see that after the blank circle of the void, the cycle comes back to a river flowing by the roots of a tree (both strong symbols of nature, the life-force, the unconscious) and to the wanderer returning to the market place, which is the realm of human society and activity.

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.