Michael Socha

I was never on the side of the teachers at school. Even though I put all the work into getting the main role in the end-of-year musical when I was 11, they didn't give it me, even though they knew I should have had it. That sort of drove me into am dram and getting the main part in another production. And I did.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.