I thought it very strange, and very sad, that the fairy kingdom largely appears to be English. I thought it was time for some regional representation. And the Nac Mac Feegle are, well, they're like tiny little Scottish Smurfs who have seen Braveheart altogether too many times.

He's out of his depth on a wet pavement.

It must be powerful language if you canna make oout what the heel it’s goin’ on aboot!

I don't read an awful lot of fiction and when I do, it tends to be lightweight stuff.

I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer's as an insult, and I decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces that I could against this wretched disease. I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer's it's the best form of Alzheimer's to have.

If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.

Botswana is also the only country in the world with a colour in its flag meant to represent rain (a sort of blue-grey). Not many people know this.