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.

The peculiar thing is that, in focusing only on the here and now, Buddhism seems to despise the world.

The quality of that 'who I am', is what I hope comes out in the writing.

You might call this innocence. I had a sense of another world that had not been spoken of to me.

[My muse] feels nostalgic for Japan, and, perhaps strangely, for the pioneer days of America.

The weird thing is, I'm not entirely sure that I am meant to think that such a gift is who I am according to the philosophy underlying Vedanta. But I have long been stubborn like that, for some reason. It's a gift, as I say.

What I find difficult about Buddhism, though it is also one of its significant fascinations, is the focus on what is immediately and physically present. To me, this seems a denial of the imagination, and the imagination is very important to me.