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Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever... this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.' All the details get watered down but don't quite disappear.

You live overseas, you see these exotic places and you want to know about them. But, weirdly, it also made me homesick for all these very prosaic places in America.

My father was an airline pilot, so we travelled more spontaneously than a lot of families. On a Thursday, we could decide to go somewhere like Barbados the next day for a long weekend.

I think the family is the place where the most ridiculous and least respectable things in the world go on.

I managed to take a family trip to the Bahamas and it was quite lovely.

We are finding new areas in the ocean every day. It's as alien as going to outer space.

I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world.

For centuries my father's family lived on Britain's biggest tidal river, the Severn, on which there was a huge trade with the interior, and through the Port of Bristol with America.