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.

This is the strange thing about existing in time. As [Philip] Larkin puts it, "truly, though our element is time, we are not used to the strange perspectives open at each moment of our lives" - something like that.

Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.

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

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

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

I've never been baptised.