What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it's so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I've received a spam text.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My address book of dealers and private collectors, smugglers and fixers, agents, runners and the peculiar assortment of art hangers-on was longer than anyone else's in the field.
I'm a bit of a pick-pocket on-set. If something is small enough to go in my pocket, and it will be neat memorabilia, it's gone.
I've been slightly obsessed with paper and notebooks. Among my most precious possessions is a small light-blue, breviary-sized volume - four-and-a-half inches wide, seven inches tall - made by a company called Denbigh.
Other writers tell me about these bushel baskets delivered at the front door. If I've gotten 50 letters over the last 18 years, I'd be surprised.
One time, a girl dropped her phone in my pocket and I found it and was like, 'There you go.' And she said, 'If you'd had my phone, you'd have had to meet up with me to give it back.'
The Sun in London ran a front page declaring my bum a national treasure. I really did laugh at that. Its not like it can actually do anything, except wiggle.
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.
We are more and more into technology. Everything is texting, and everything is instant. Flowers are completely impractical as a method of communication when you could just send a text.
I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long.
Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.