I'd started doing fanzines from the age of nine. I'd been doing as many copies as you can get carbon paper into an upright typewriter, and I'd try to sell them at school.
I come from an almost wholly secular background and have no quarrel with religion.
Some of my earliest work was in comics. I tend to think in pictures and always like to write scenes possessing the dynamic you find in comics.
I had this funny family. At one end, they were breeding dogs in south-east London - for greyhound racing - and at the other, my uncle was living in Downing Street. And I would actually go to Downing Street, which didn't strike me as funny. I'd get on the number 15 bus.
P.G. Wodehouse was a huge influence on me when I was younger, as were Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Bernard Shaw.
Though I don't have any serious argument with Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods', I believe that Americans cease to be Europeans - the land makes them become Americans. You see it happening all the time when you travel around America.
I really did have a very egalitarian upbringing.
I have a kind of innate sense of structure, which also makes me a good mimic.
