First person that inspired you to become a story-teller?  Be it teacher, grandmother, the radio.

Working-class kids didn’t have books in the early sixties and nobody told stories, except about the football. When I was about nineteen, Arthur Grimble’s A Pattern of Islands made me realise what travel writing could do – that it was the perfect vehicle in which to smuggle in the ineffable.
 
Is there a home?  How many? Where do you write now?  

Yes there is a Victorian butcher’s shop on Hampstead Heath that has been home for thirty years. I write wherever I am – it’s a wholly inaccessible luxury not to have to get on with it every single day. What would one tell the gas man?
 
Writer or travel-writer or adventurer ?  How will booksellers describe you, when we want to carry on selling your books?

‘Writer’ is quite enough

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