We live in a multi-cultural society far more open to international ideas. If you'd told me 20 years ago I'd drive through Bury and see someone sitting outside a cafe drinking a latte, I'd have laughed. In fact, I wouldn't have even known what a latte was.
About Lucknow, I have become a frequent visitor here now and have started knowing the city quite well. In fact, I was also planning to set up a cafe here as I loved the city so much. There is so much scope for business here.
My part of Brooklyn has always been a very warm neighbourhood, even before I had anything going on in the music industry. When I step out of my house to go for coffee on Saturday mornings, I might say hi to 20 people before I get to the cafe. I think they feel they own me, in a way.
Everyone would have bigger and safer cars if they didn't have those CAFE standards: corporate average fuel economy.
In Israel, there's a lot to learn from anyone, because to live there you've got to deal with the truth. Things happen real fast. Your day goes from cool to catastrophic in one second. Israelis know that the cafe you're in could blow up, or the shopping mall, and they rock that.
But one of the most fantastic things about Ireland and Dublin is that the pubs are like Paris and the cafe culture. And Dublin, in many ways, is a pub culture.
Australians are coffee snobs. An influx of Italian immigrants after World War II ensured that - we probably had the word 'cappuccino' about 20 years before America. Cafe culture is really big for Aussies. We like to work hard, but we take our leisure time seriously.
In Zurich, in a cafe overlooking the Limmat, I ate butter-drenched white asparagus pulled from the ground that morning; it had the aftertaste of champagne. I've been able to appreciate epic meals in San Francisco, New Orleans, Berlin, Paris, Las Vegas.
What I try very hard to do is have an hour or so in the morning when I leave the house and don't have my phone with me. I'll go sit in a cafe and read and handwrite in my notebook and not be facing a screen. My head will be clear. I will be able to hear myself think. Because honestly for the rest of the day it's just screens, screens, screens.
I'm creative in my own life. I'm creative when I step out the door. I'm creative when I pick up a glass. Do you know what I mean? I'm one of those dreadful people who probably should have been born at the end of the 19th century and been in cafe society. That would have suited me fine.
