I work three days at home, and two days in the British Library or the London Library, just to get out of the house and hide from the children.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

London has fine museums, the British Library is one of the greatest library institutions in the world... It's got everything you want, really.

I work out four to five days a week, alternating three workouts.

I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

This might sound really foolish, but when I came to Edinburgh in 1988 I had spent nearly all my life living south of Bristol, and I was just amazed that a city like Edinburgh was actually in the British isles.