It is 10 years since I used drugs or drank alcohol and my life has improved immeasurably. I have a job, a house, a cat, good friendships and generally a bright outlook.

My mate Karl once told me he’d been looking after this five-year-old boy who – not knowing enough to have an ironic inflection to his words – said, ‘I want something.’ He didn’t know what it was. Not ‘I want sweets’, or ‘a can of Coke’, or ‘to watch the Tweenies’, or whatever it is they’re into now (I like Bagpuss), but ‘I want something.’ All of us, I think, have that feeling. And what heroin does when you first start taking it is tell you what that something is.

Life’s never a postcard of life, is it? It never feels like how you’d want it to look.

When you bump into your own mom at an orgy, it's hard not to get her to read into certain things.

What it felt to me was like the dissolution of my idea of myself. I felt like separateness evaporated. I felt this tremendous sense of oneness. I'm quite an erratic thinker, quite an adrenalized person, but through meditation, I found this beautiful serenity and selfless connection. My tendency towards selfishness, I felt that kind of exposed as a superficial and pointless perspective to have. I felt very relaxed, a sense of oneness. I felt love.

We don't need to know what goes on beyond time. We need to know how to save this planet that we live on. To align our consciousness with the fundamental frequencies with which all have in common, and to generate love and energy between us.

I don't mind having a reputation as a serious and spiritual person. I think that would be a nice reputation to have