Is there a piece of advice that you can think back on that you think was the best piece of advice you ever gave anybody? I ask that in the context of the best piece of advice where it wasn't necessarily apparent.

Yeah, you know, look, over 30 years, it's hard.

I've dealt with everything.

People who've been kidnapped or apparently kidnapped, you know, earthquakes.

Oh, there are lots of tragedies, you know, people getting into various different difficulties, takeovers, activism, all kinds of things over.

30 years you do a lot.

You learn that everybody's human, everybody's flawed, everybody makes mistakes, and you have to learn to meet people where they are.

What do you whisper to them?

To see that it's reaching audiences of people that would never get the chance to see it beforehand, how does that feel as a writer and as a creative?

Yeah, like the whole Leon thing was just absolutely mental because it was like, we were doing like an exchange with universities and they were like, there's a massive theatre festival going on in Leon in France.

Would you like to write something for it? And I was like...

okay so i kind of like embedded it into what i was doing in my course so i wrote a show called cocoon which basically looked over um a group of mates in high school they're all in form and then basically act one is when they're in high school act two is ten years later and they re-night after an incident that happens and it kind of just looks at the stereotypes in high school that kind of makes you realize that high school's not the big issue that you think it is when you're at that age and you look back at its shifts.

And we literally went with, there was 10 in the cast and then there was me and two producers and we just got given a lump sum of money and told to go.

Wow.

So that was a bit weird as well.

I'll just

Mm.

Just didn't like the taste of red meat, couldn't process it, and then eventually that, that went on to chicken, and then it went on to fish.

And then one day I announced at the family table, um, that I was no longer gonna eat meat, and my father asked me if I was feeling okay.

And your daughter is, and both children are, they're, they're great kids, and they're-

Like, as younger, my mother would, would always sort of pack my lunch and we used to get up early in the morning because we would milk the cows before we go to school.

And you'd go and feed them in the winter, in the dark, and bring hay, and my father would already be gone to work somewhere else.

Can you tell me about that?

I was seven years old.

My parents were out at something, and I was with my grandmother in her house, which was about three miles, four miles away.

I remember my mother walking into my grandmother's bed- bedroom, and I, I was sleeping in the bed beside my grandmother.

I was seven years old.

And she had our dog in her arms, and everyone was covered in soot and dirt, and, um, she said, "We've lost everything." And I said, "What do you mean we've lost everything?" And she said, "Our house burned to the ground last night." And, uh, all my father's savings were under a mattress.

How did that happen, Gray Matter?

Gray Matter, um...