Possessions. The very word is potent - suggestive as it is of ownership both material and erotic. To possess. Possession. Possessed.

If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us.

My interior is very, very dense - Proustian-looking, sort of Henry James. The walls are covered in pictures, and I transformed the big drawing room into a library lined with books.

My mother is the sort of woman who not only can raise a chicken and roast it to moist perfection but, as she proved to my openmouthed sister and me on a family holiday to Morocco when we were very young, can barter for one in a market, kill it, pluck it, and then cook it to perfection.

We're obviously in a strange environment where practically anyone can set themselves up as a pundit of sorts. It's all about sorting the wheat from the chaff, and I'm very interested in reading different points of view, and certainly different generations than my own that have such a very different world view.

There can never be any real freedom on earth as long as people try to exert ownership over the natural resources of the world.