I like America very much: it's a place I've spent a lot of time travelling around, experiencing and in a looser way, studying, I'm fortunate, furthermore, in having family there; so in a sense, it's a place I've been familiar with before I could even conceive where it was on the Atlas. It took time for me to geographically understand where it was, when I was very young I thought it was somewhere just to the north of Scotland and easy to drive to.

America then, or my sense of it, has been an integral part of my consciousness since I can remember, almost a foundation memory beyond which there is only haze and mist.

My first real encounter, the moment it moved from subjective to concrete, and was no longer mediated through the TV, but became up close and personal instead, happened in the late Sixties. I was very young, six, maybe seven, watching with my speechless mother as a US serviceman in full Navy rig walked purposefully towards our house. One of my cousins, who on a whim and with some leave to spare had flown in to the UK from God knows where (maybe the Mediterranean. I've still not asked and I've seen him many times subsequently. Nor have I asked him how he felt. England in the late sixties must have been quite an experience.) had decided to travel deep into the heart of South Yorkshire to see us.

I was mesmerised, we all were, my father, my mother, perhaps her more than either of us since it was her nephew, her sister's eldest. Her sister, someone she loved deeply and corresponded with regularly in spite of the geographical vastness between them; he was a touchstone for memories and experiences that were unknown to either me or my father. It was a very moving meeting.

I felt exotic, especially as my US cousin gave me his campaign ribbons and (don't laugh), an empty pack of Kool cigarettes. This had taken me in an instant from being just another Yorkshire lad into someone who was glamorous, someone who had deep and visible connections with other worlds far more more alluring and extraordinary than anything offered by the hard-grafting, hard-living village life I knew.

I certainly did not have the precociousness at that age to see it as a defining moment in my life; now I do. Ever so quietly, invisibly, it pushed me to recognise there really were other worlds, with other consciousnesses to understand and other cultures to explore, and all as valid as that which then formed my horizon. A South Yorkshire village was all I knew until then, from that point the road forked and forked again, and has never stopped doing so. It told me there was a wealth of a world to explore. I've not stopped since. I don't intend to. Ever. I owe this to America.