My favourite tea is lapsang souchong.

I'm not claiming anything like sainthood - merely a native perception.

I was born in the seventies, age of bad haircuts and grainy colour photos.

I think I'm probably too close to the seventies to be able to analyse them (it?) effectively.

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 grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.

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".