Compulsory headphones for phone users in public.

My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: they are talkers with whom it’s a privilege just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free. Can they come and see me? Yes, but only in a way. So now every day I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable TV (often closed-captioned, just to torture myself) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two-thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

Decent arts funding.

A hydrogen-powered private jet for me and my dog. We’d be zero carbon dioxide emissions, so could go anywhere we liked.

I always wanted to be a rapper.

When I was young and carefree, before I realised what the obstacles were that we face as black people. I was raised in a beautiful home with incredible parents. They allowed me to enjoy what it was to be a child.

To my father, for the time that was lost when we weren’t getting along. We were able to reconcile a few months before he passed away five years ago.

Creating. When everyone goes to bed and then you have six or seven hours to create peacefully. I’ve become nocturnal. Even on a night when I am not in the studio, I still won’t go to sleep till six in the morning.

I bought myself a diamond pinky ring for two million dollars.