Too many people who go to the best schools, and get great grades, are confronted with a choice of trivial work that is very high paid, and has some sort of surface status, like senior partner in a law firm, or corporate executive, but most of the work can be done by anybody.

The modern architecture that I have been weaned on also espouses (clear) function, (exposed) structure, and (raw) material as principles—characteristics that tend to be accessed only from realistic or substantive dimensions. Fictionality or imagination, the other dimension, is omitted entirely. However, Vitruvius emphasized venustas, in other words attraction or beauty as a necessity along with strength and function.

People think that when you write something it’s cathartic, and I had written a lot of personal articles at Esquire, and people always say, “Oh God, it must have been so great when you finally wrote about having small breasts.” No. You get through that, and then you write it. It is not the writing that is the catharsis.

Brummies have adopted the sense that we live in a shit-hole, but in terms of green space, culture and community, it’s unrivalled. It’s a calm and happy place; my heart rate drops when I get off the train from London. I say, kind of with tongue in cheek, but not that far in my cheek, that it’s the best city in the world.

I fell in love with the stories by William Beebe, who was an ocean explorer. He discussed what it was like to go down inside a submersible, and peer out of a port hole and see beautiful, luminescent fish, with lights down the side like ocean liners. Bizarre creatures of the sort that you just don’t see walking down the street, or going into the forest, or even looking around in shallow water.

They encouraged me, the way I do others now, that if you really have something that you like to do, that’s what you probably should do. Despite what everybody says, that you can’t make a living, or that’s not practical, or a thousand reasons why you may not do this or this or this. If that’s what your heart says you should do, chances are that you ought to listen.