David Roberts

When you sling a saddle atop a llama's back, just after he's rolled in the dirt to scratch the unscratchable tickle of having lugged an ungrateful hiker's 90 pounds of impedimenta another eight miles along the trail, you're struck by how matted, coarse, and snarly the wool seems. But that's why it makes for versatile outdoor wear.

For a boy of ten, used to the coal bings and rust-coloured burns of Cowdenbeath, the fields and woodland of Kingswood, with its overgrown but stately avenue of copper-barked sequoias, felt like a local version of paradise.

Yeah, well when I first started working, it was $5 a show; it was probably a little higher by the time I got to my own show, but I remember that they put me under contract at $100 a week, which to me was really an astronomical price.