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I grew up in Lincolnshire, trying to get the daughters of farmers and policemen to like me. It didn't go well until I got to college where, suddenly, there were different sorts of humans.

I've got a farm in Somerset, and I think it's God's own country. I love it.

It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn't have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.

I was raised on a little farm about 12 miles out of Portsmouth, Ohio.

On my mother's side, I come from Midlands engineers and, on my father's, from tenant farmers near Oxford.

I was born in Cambridge but brought up in and around Winchester, in Hampshire. I've also lived in Hong Kong and America.

My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.

My childhood was as heavily gendered as any you would find in a working-class household in Lincolnshire.

My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur.

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.