This is for Simon. I've notice in a lot of interviews you tend play with your fingers or pick at the furniture you are sitting in. Is that because you are nervous or just very fidgety? I've also notice your fingers are quite often bandages up, why's that? Fan for life. Anna

”Dear Anna, one of the characteristics of growing older that I have experienced is that I find myself becoming more and more intolerant and the thing which seems to upset me the most these days is badly designed or shoddily manufactured furniture, particularly seating. Sit me down in a good Mies Van der Rohe "Barcelona Chair" or give me a white leather covered B&B Italia modular sofa on which to recline and I am perfectly happy. However, when we are on a promotional tour, doing filmed interviews ad nausea, my frustration with the cheap and inelegant hotel suite furniture which inevitably, it seems, is always present, has as time goes by, begun to manifest itself increasingly in a subconscious effort to unpick the offending articles a sort of "tic" i.e. to unpick if you like. To date the bills from hotels to the band for my "vandalism" is in excess of $70,000 (I once managed to unravel in its entirety, the hideous beige knitted backrest of a rather pretentious chaise-longue , whist promoting the Astronaut album in Winnapeg; the bill for this alone was $7,500(canadian) ) which I can only imagine getting worse as time goes by.

Unfortunately the same, it must be said, after so much unpicking, can only also be true for my fingernails - hence the bandages. yours, s”