every time i come down the hill into padstow and look across the estuary i think, "this is where i wanti believe i would love to spend all my life there, i would get bored. but as a place to spend most of my childhood and most of my adult life, it's just my spiritual home, really. it's very difficult to sort of put your finger on what's so special about it. i suppose it's always because it's this peninsula jutting out into the atlantic, it's a bit cut off from the rest of the world and we all like to think of it as being cut off. we like this idea that you keep still bumping into cornish people who have never been across the tamar, the river that separates cornwall from devon. i mean, that's really good. it's lovely, in this sort of mad world that people still feel so rooted in such a place. and the fact that although i have lived there for over a0 years, i will never be considered a local. you know, no chance of that. did you find the business side of it quite tricky? because there is a lot of, you know, those people who love to create in the kitchen, and then actually making the finan

a nightclub in padstow, i might have said this in the book, is like an 0pera might have said this inainly in the 19705. -- the others on. certainly in the 1970s. —— middle of the parmesan. we we re 1970s. —— middle of the parmesan. we were a couple of nice boys in our early 20s, we couldn't run it properly and it was closed down, really, because it was declared an unruly house or something like that and the police took away our licensors, the booze licence. —— licenses. i was faced with imminent ba n kru ptcy licenses. i was faced with imminent bankruptcy and the restaurant was the only thing i could do and my fear at the time was of going bust again. we didn't go bust because my mother and his mother bailed out. but it is a solitary lesson, frannie body who has gone bankrupt, it is such a terrible thing to happen to you. —— for anybody. such a terrible thing to happen to you. —— foranybody. i such a terrible thing to happen to you. —— for anybody. i thought, such a terrible thing to happen to you. —— foranybody. ithought, i such a terrible thing to happen to you. —— for anybody. i t

itjust never occurred to me that a) anybody would be interested about a small fish restaurant in padstowbody would be interested in me, and c) i couldn't write anyway. i think what i learnt then was that, of course they'd be interested, because the next generation's coming on, and you are endlessly, the industry, the literature, and books and everything, notjust books, but film, always needs younger people coming up. and that's what i didn't get at the time. i thought, "why me?" and i'm sure a lot of young people feel the same way. your autobiography, under a mackerel sky, you better explain the title first. well, i didn't come up with it. it was actually someone at ebury books, one of the editors, but i thought it was such a good one because, when my father died, and i left england rather hurriedly, i was walking out of a pub in notting hill gate, and there was a mackerel sky and i put it in the book, and a mackerel sky is a sign of sort of big change ahead, which indeed was the case for me. i didn't name it that, but it's just the best name as far as i'm concerned, because obviously a