You either get Norfolk, with its wild roughness and uncultivated oddities, or you don't. It's not all soft and lovely. It doesn't ask to be loved.

I am gay. I am a Jew. My mother lost over a dozen of her family to Hitler's anti-Semitism. Every time in Russia (and it is constantly) a gay teenager is forced into suicide, a lesbian 'correctively' raped, gay men and women beaten to death by neo-Nazi thugs while the Russian police stand idly by, the world is diminished and I for one, weep anew at seeing history repeat itself.

I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday... Mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

Weather is real. It is absolutely real: when it rains, it rains – you get wet, there is no question about it. It is also true about weather that you can’t control it; you can’t say if I wish hard enough it won’t rain. It is equally true that if the weather is bad one day it will get better and what I had to learn was to treat my moods like the weather.

Families where there is not much laughter I think are signs of some sort of dysfunctionality or sickness.

After the shooting of John Lennon and the early death of so many great stars and the utter naked venal mercantile marketing of pop music and rock music, I don't think anyone really believes that music is anything more than another commodity.