“I like the career that I have had because there are so many talking points. It’s difficult to know whether I would have got that from something more serious. I was always interested in sociology because I was good at it and interested in people, but that is also why I like photography. It opens doors.”

“I think what’s really interesting about photography is time and space. Time is a big factor and all sorts of things happen within a particular time frame. You get to know how long something is going to take before the moment elapses and things change. It’s a bit like judging the direction of the wind, in a funny kind of way. If someone is being particularly extrovert then you take more pictures, because their facial expression will change more often whereas if you do a corporate job, you find that business people tend to maintain a very similar expression. They are also shyer of the camera and don’t particularly enjoy the experience so you want to make it as painless for them as possible.”

“To make the burning embers of the fire I had to acquire and arrange orange yellow and red coloured tissue paper, but the fire needed kindling. I made that by smashing a basket which I’d got from a permanent market place in Chelsea, where they had lots of expensive plants, flowers and vastly overpriced weaving baskets. Time was fast approaching so I was forced to decimate this basket in the back of the taxi! It was a major challenge, an incredibly tight deadline and I sweated buckets for about five hours to set the scene.”

“Nowadays it is hard for some of us to make it through a day without using email and the Internet in some way, but a couple of decades ago everyone got on just fine without it. The reason for this is that there were good, solid systems in place which offered more or less the same service at the expense of a little more effort. And, of course, no one bemoaned the extra effort, for that was the norm. Email was, in fact, more of a development than a revolution.”

“Lucy didn’t write down to children and that was the same of all that generation of writers. CJ Lewis was a bit before Lucy, but Philippa Pearce, although younger, was very much of the same time. They didn’t write down to children and that’s why all those books were on this list that I was given at college. The books were used to develop children’s use of language and imagination, and Lucy does write very well, there’s absolutely no doubt about it. A Stranger at Green Knowe, for example, won the Carnegie Medal in 1961.”

“When I do a tour I start by saying that I was born untidy and have been untidy ever since. It certainly isn’t sanitised. It’s not like going round a National Trust house. The Annexe at the back they wouldn’t want to see anyway, except for the Japanese visitors who do because a famous Japanese writer lived there. His name is Hayashi Nozomu, or Nozomu Hayashi as we would write it, Hayashi being his surname. Before him a transcriber of ancient manuscripts called Terrence Bishop lived there, who used to sit muttering to himself and absolutely spooked my children. He becomes Mr Pope in one of the books.”

“Then they just keep going. There is absolutely no planned obsolescence about them; they were built to last more than a lifetime. HMV weren’t thinking ‘Well, if we build them to such a standard they will break after 10 years and people will have to buy another one,’ they didn’t think that way in those days.”

“Children especially love coming over and looking at the gramophones and saying, ‘How does the music get from that black thing to what I am hearing?’ It’s quite a difficult thing to explain, but it is magical. You wouldn’t be asked to explain that process to a child who has an MP3 player, but with the gramophone you are showing the process in reverse, saying ‘What you hear actually comes from this machine and the sound was made in this way,’ and so on.”

“In the old days, the budget for 2-inch tape would be more than the budget for most modern albums, because tape is very expensive, but the great thing about transferring the mix into Pro Tools is that you don’t wear the tape out by rubbing it over the heads the whole time, so you can use it again and again. I have 20 reels of tape that I gradually work through and, relatively speaking, it has a long shelf life.”

“Once you have an objective to aim for, it is odd how very quickly you find you can do something. If you are just aimlessly messing around you will only go so far. But once you have a specific task in mind, within a matter of weeks, or maybe less, you can get something up and working. You might have do a little bit of debugging and further work on it but you’d be amazed how fast you progress.”

“Without really talking it over with the boss, I undertook to do an extensive amount of software development. I got carried away and I was actually doing a lot of it at home in my own time, so it was just a personal thing. I did all the costing and came up with the quote, but I didn’t have a whopping amount of money in there for software.”

“One thing that interested me when I started getting into reverb programming and looking at how reverbs were made up, rather than just switching on a preset, was how often the patch has quite a low-pass filter on it, down at about six or eight KHz. I’m talking about decent reverbs like Waves Renaissance reverb or Trueverb, or any that are modelled on real places and plates. At first I wondered why on earth anyone would deliberately be hacking off all that top end information, but it is because it sounds right. When you listen to a Beatles album you notice that everything is pristinely positioned, but the frequency range of the material is not that great. Of course, they were limited by what the technology could do, but when technology improved to allow you to take your reverb tail right up, they thought ‘No!’ That’s because the old producers and engineers knew which limitations worked.”

Albert jerkily paced around the garden for a whole 20 minutes trying to locate the sound. Passersby thought him to be an unstable madman. He was, after all, dressed somewhat erratically and looked quite odd. Then there was the way he kept twitching his head, grasping an ear, crawling on the ground and pressing his head up against brick walls.