If we love the sea as much as we claim to we'll do everything we possibly can to keep it healthy. Otherwise we might as well take up golf.

The blank page doesn't bother me. It's the voice in my head (not always my own) that gives me the yips. It's worse when I'm not making stuff up.

A problem not so well understood is the growing presence of plastics in the marine food chain. If we don't make big changes fast, the fish we do save may no longer be safe to eat.

I've been a writer and a parent since adolescence, it feels like, and I'm still making both gigs up as I go along. I did both in different forms of isolation - too young by conventional standards, too far off-grid culturally and geographically. So my experience is probably too specific to be useful. None of us do this stuff the same way. We just try to endure and press on, I guess.

And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you.

It is always amusing to me and delightful of course that my books sell so well in America and other parts of the world. I can't imagine what people must think as they read my books in Poland. Or in Hebrew and Greek. People are reading all the stories which are about bits of Western Australia.

Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers