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

If we do want to do that [ colonise space to survive, ], then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.

[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.

Non-pantheist models for god seem almost completely untenable to me, though not without interest.

I think I still have [commemorative coin ] somewhere. Why was this given to me? I think every child in the country must have received one [ from Queen's Silver Jubilee]. That's the last time that I recall something of an innocent, more-or-less unquestioning monarchist patriotism in Britain.

I never seem to find what I'm looking for, though. I suppose I feel, these days, too aware of schedules and things, to let myself get lost in the rain. Anyway, I came back home, and it was still raining, and as I was approaching the driveway of the house, and the front garden with its bushy flower bed, I caught a cooking smell from somewhere on the air. I don't know why, exactly, but it appealed to me as a Nagai Kafu moment.

The weird thing is, I'm not entirely sure that I am meant to think that such a gift is who I am according to the philosophy underlying Vedanta. But I have long been stubborn like that, for some reason. It's a gift, as I say.