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For much of my life - my sister and I have talked about this - when we moved, we just thought the world behind us disappeared, and all of the people, they just didn't exist any more.

Sadly, it seems as if there is no longer any real history. Just momentary reactions to events that disappear like sky-writing with items like Twitter, texts, Meerkat, Snapchat, and Instagram.

I see myself as a journalist reporting neglected stories about our past and trying to bring rigor, reason and intuition to the quest.

I realised I was living in my own universe with lots of assistants. I didn't have a cell phone; I didn't know how to use a computer. Everybody was doing everything for me. So I left and moved to New York. It was the end of an era, and I must say I found myself a bit lost. I wasn't in the protected Mugler universe any more.

I never write to disappear and escape. The truth is exactly the opposite. Most people strike me as escaping and disappearing in one way or another - into their jobs, their daily routines, their delusions about themselves and others.

Had I not stepped into the saddle in the first place, entire cultures, histories, and most importantly, profound connections with people and animals whom I now counted as my friends would have otherwise passed by, invisible.

I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening - the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone-deafness to the social injustice all around us - seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent.

Playing Christ, I began to feel shut away from the world. A newspaper became one of my biggest luxuries. I noticed that some of my close friends began treating me with reverence.

I lived a normal life for a number of years. I had kids. I lived up on a farm in Gloucestershire in rural England, and just kind of got back to reality again.