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I met my husband, Jacob, in medical school. We married and went to live in Hawaii where his family lived. It was very beautiful, but I wasn't used to being on an island and needed wide open spaces. Eventually we moved to Maine, New England.

I grew up in a small town about 40 miles outside London, but it was a fairly cosmopolitan household.

When I met my designs in the market of a remote village in the West Indies, or in the airport restaurant in Zurich, I felt like the mother of many well-behaved children.

There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.

I met my wife in Oxford, fell in love with her, and followed her to New York. I was an illegal there for the first few years, until we got married, so I ended up doing lots of interesting jobs, some for a few days, some for a few months.

I went to a number of foreign countries, and during whenever I went, I would try to go to an orphanage or a home for children. And I was seeing thousands of kids around the world that needed homes.

When I married Paul, we lived in St John's Wood in London. We had nice next-door neighbours, but you don't know anyone else. Everyone lives in isolation.

When I was little, I grew up in a place called Hertfordshire, which is just near London, but out in the country, and I visited Pakistan in the summers to go and see my family on my dad's side.

We lived on isolated farms and ranches, far from anybody, and when I was young I knew very few other kids, so I lived to a great extent in my imagination.

As a child, I lived in Germany at the Ramstein air force base, where my dad sang at a nightclub in Kaiserslautern. My parents couldn't afford a babysitter, so when I was, like, ten or 11, I would go with them to the bar until two in the morning.