Top 1979 Age Quotes

I'm often asked where my nickname 'Kun' comes from. My parents says it was a Japanese cartoon I used to watch on television when I was very young, set in the Stone Age, where the main character was a boy called Kum Kum, the little caveman.

At the age of nine, I could cross the length of Glasgow on a succession of buses, wearing regulation garter-topped stockings and compulsory cap and - if I'd done well enough to earn the honour in last week's test - with a First World War medal on a striped ribbon pinned to my brown blazer. I must have looked like a chocolate soldier.

The coming-of-age story has sort of become a joke. It's something to capitalize on, and that is painful because when you are coming of age - when you are going through something like that - the genre is so meaningful.