Middle age is great. I can watch 'Springwatch' with impunity. And I’m nearly old enough to go on a Saga cruise. You have to go to a lot more funerals though. The best funeral I ever went to was that of George the goldfish. My elder daughter, who was nine at the time and scary even then, insisted on the full works: shroud; coffin; headstone; floral tributes. She also sang a lament she'd written for the occasion. By the time she got to the lines ‘He is gone/Back to God/He was a goldfish/Not a cod’, her father and I were howling. Luckily she mistook this for grief.
The person I most admire is my grandmother. She raised eleven children between the 1920s and the 1950s in a three-bedroomed, terraced house, yet even when she had six aged five and under (including newborn triplets) she always kept a pencil and a scrap of paper in her apron pocket to jot down lines of poetry as they occurred to her. She was the original storyteller in our family.
Mind you, she's got a lot to answer for. I don't even get as far as Maria pirouetting over the mountains: the first mist-filled frames of The Sound of Music have me snivelling ...
The best gig I ever went to was the Clash at Bristol Exhibition Centre on 5 November 1977. I was right down the front and I exchanged glances with Joe Strummer for at least two seconds. Most gigs I go to these days have seats, though I'd prefer to dance.
I suspect I’m trying to live with. Ordering my thoughts is like herding cats. I could be looking at you as you talk – might even have an attentive expression on my face – but odds are I won’t have heard a word. The usual term for this is ADD but I prefer ADOLS (Attention Deficit Oh Look! Squirrels!). Also, I can't tell my right from my left. This means I'm not very good at driving or navigating (though in all fairness, if people troubled to learn the difference between 'left' and 'no, this left', it wouldn't be).
The sacred is important to me … Those moments outside of yourself ...
… as is the profane. Unlike my Brethren forebears, I’m treading the wide path to God.
There are certain places which respond to your presence. It's as if they'd like you to tell their story; what happened on that spot in days gone by.
A great tale can enthrall me for years. The book that has had the greatest influence on me is ‘The Red Pony’ by John Steinbeck. I got it out of the library when I was about eight, expecting to read about gymkhanas and rosettes but there wasn't a sniff of either. And then the wretched creature went and died! Needless to say, I returned it in disgust. Yet that one abandoned reading coloured my childhood and the story haunts me even now.
What goes round comes round. Strangely, my kids didn't always relish traipsing across vast tracts of the West Country, even with the promise of a pub at the end. ('I'm telling you, it's just around this corner!') But whenever I start to feel guilty, I remember a red-faced, recalcitrant child huffing and puffing along the coastpath between Shaldon and Maidencombe thirty-odd years ago and know that one day they'll be inflicting the same torments upon their own offspring ...
