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

We're all more or less interested in the 'swinging sixties', of course, but that's not what I mean. I'm interested in the particular naive glamour that clings to the post-war and pre-Hendrix era.

As children in the seventies we were told about nebulous 'strangers'. By definition, we didn't know who these strangers were, and we didn't know what they wanted to do, but only that they were sinister. I think that was the stage the seventies were at.

I associate my childhood with two things, mainly: the North Devon countryside and a sense of connection to another world.

If there is innocence on Earth again, I tend to imagine it in more [Henry David]Thoreau sort of terms.

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

Non-pantheist models for god seem almost completely untenable to me, though not without interest.