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

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

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.

It's interesting, the sense of pastoral utopia that exists in so much fantasy - in [Edward ] Dunsany, [John R.R.] Tolkien and so on.

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

I think the natural is, for many people, the gateway to something supernatural or otherworldly.

The urban, on the other hand, is often seen as more real and mundane, even though it is obviously far more recent in terms of planetary development. I think this might be because nature corresponds to the unconscious and the artificial world of the city and human culture to the conscious mind.