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

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.

Anyway, yes, telephones but not mobile phones, fish and chips still wrapped in actual newspaper and still with some kind of flavour, people visiting each other without having to consult their appointment diaries, not being able to record anything from the television; if you missed it you missed it - these were all the kinds of thing that made up the normality of the seventies.

I never went to church as a child. I did not .

[william] Burroughs, incidentally, took up the slogan that we are "Here to go", which contradicts the tendency in Eastern mysticism to advocate staying where you are because there's nowhere to go anyway. I feel conflicted on this one.

The cultural products of America from this period [ fifties and sixties] are like a vision of paradise or something. I find it utterly intoxicating.

[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.