My favourite tea is lapsang souchong.

We all know about the car breaking down on a deserted road scenario. That's cliché. I'm thinking more of Cider with Rosie, as in, the dark side.

People may wish to say that the thing that is in conflict with my creativity is not Buddhism - that's fine.

On the other hand, the seventies were drab. That is, I am utterly fascinated by the fifties and sixties.

Lots of things were there [in the seventies], in the social experience, but not quite named, lurking like a stranger on the edge of the playground.

Another part of the rejection I mention was the realisation that Buddhism quite simply ignores or dismisses a whole hemisphere of human experience that finds expression in and is enshrined by the mystery religions.

I'm not sure if there is a cultural loss of innocence specifically associated with the seventies. The oil crisis? The Watergate scandal? I really don't know. There's nothing there on the scale of Hiroshima.