The prospect of dating someone in her twenties becomes less appealing as you get older. At some point in your fife, your tolerance level goes down and you realize that, with someone much younger, there's nothing really to talk about.
I play the baritone horn - which is like a mini tuba, and is the least sexy instrument you can choose, and I generally say I don't play one so I don't have to acknowledge it. I also play fife.
Snow isn't just pretty. It also cleanses our world and our senses, not just of the soot and grime of a Fife mining town but also of a kind of weary familiarity, a taken-for-granted quality to which our eyes are all too susceptible.
The more excited the rooster gets, the higher his voice goes. He's got a little bit of a Barney Fife quality to him.
From there I did a one year theatre acting course in Fife, and then three years of drama school in London.
Cinema dominated the Fife coalfield towns. We lived in Lochgelly, but my mum was caught up in Hollywood. She was in love with the style and glamour. Sometimes she would come with me to the cinema in the afternoons, and she would say things like, 'I wouldn't mind a peck with Gregory.'
One of my great influences was Don Knotts as Barney Fife.
'The Asylum Dance' was written after I'd moved back to Scotland and was a response to moving to my old home area of Fife.
The son of a Fife mining town sledder of coal-bings, bottle-forager, and picture-house troglodyte, I was decidedly urban and knew little about native fauna, other than the handful of birds I saw on trips to the beach or Sunday walks.
When I was ten years old, my family left a cold, damp prefab in West Fife and moved to Corby, Northamptonshire, where my father quickly found work at what was then the Stewarts & Lloyds steelworks.