The statistics of mines that need clearance are staggering but the truth is it’s a challenge that is absolutely doable.

I don’t know to what extent someone can BECOME an artist – you either are or you aren’t – and if you are you’ll HAVE to make your way to some kind of sickly light, no matter how terrible the soil you were seeded in your nature will out somehow.

I didn’t really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment.

Now I’m having to live with sales of around 50,000 per album – but I’m pretty content with my place in the general scheme of things, even if it’s meant I don’t drive a fancy car and can’t afford grand vacations.

In some ways it’s taken me decades to come clean and make honest work – and still to this day, sometimes I find myself wanting to hide behind my work and deny the more biographical aspects.

I’ve been getting pretty focused about that recently, and even considered doing a masters degree to polish up the craft. I’ve been pretty lucky in that I seem to have found people online who are willing to constructively tear it apart for me, and indicate its weaknesses.

The school was prone to dishing out punishments for anything creative that didn’t fit with expectation – I just followed the logic and figured the folk club was probably much the same.

Oh yeah – for sure – hardly a week doesn’t go by when I don’t hear something wonderful that someone has made in some low-budget situation, primarily with a view to selling a few hundred copies at their concerts.

There’s nothing like doing something wrong to learn how it might be done better.

I’d make a terrible practitioner of any religion in any formal setting.