What three adjectives would you use to describe yourself?
Small, broad, Alpine.

What is your favourite taste?
Carciofi….artichokes, but not the bitter water they are boiled in.

What is your favourite sound?
Distant sounds, sounds from far far away…….. as this distance gives me a feeling of time past and time future.

What do you like to do in your spare time?
For me time is a unitary flow  and concepts like worktime, leisure time, spare time, maintenance time are meaningless. Was it Mozart who once said: “ Resting is too tiring- composing is easier”.

What book would you like everyone to read? Why?
To imagine a book that all should read is monstruous as the very idea denies the vast differences between people.

When and where are/were you happiest?
Halfway through intensive, in-depth work with a training group.

How many languages do you speak and why?
About six, but a much more interesting question would be “ which languages have you tried to learn and failed?" This list would include, Norwegian, Chinese, Turkish, Japanese and Polish.

What do you like most/least about the EFL job?
My engulfing pleasure in language teaching and teacher training lies in ever-increasing wonderment at people.

What do you like/dislike most about your appearance?
Weighing 100 kilos.

Which living person do you most admire and why?
Mandela, because of his unquenchable optimism and magnetic inter-personal intelligence.

Who (living or dead) would you invite to your best-ever dinner party?
Ghengiz Kahn because he was immensely far-sighted and clear thinking, however imbued with  the cruelty of his place and his time.

How would you like to be remembered?
The wish to be remembered is a touching illusion. Death is final as Lorca understood when he wrote to his friend Sancho Ignacio Mejias:

Te has muerto para siempre    (you have died for ever)
En un monton de perros apagados  (in a mound of snuffed-out dogs)

If you could pass one law that was guaranteed to be enacted what would it be?
1.Thou shalt only kill personally, not militarily or judicially.
2. Thou shalt kill without instrumentation.

What more do you want to achieve?
Twice what little may have been done so far.

What lessons have you learned about life?
This is a question to ask the Wise. Ask old Nestor.

What’s your favourite proverb?
A bird in the bush is worth two in the hands (this is a useful
reversal of the normal crap proverb)

A poem you know by heart
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come

The first news event you remember.
Declaration of the Korean War when I was 10 in 1950

What would you like to learn to do next?
Understand a little of brain neurology

A question I might have asked you:
Who are you?

Answer:
I do not know. How can I, from inside looking out?