Nick Harkaway

What's been interesting?

What's been strange?

And vice versa.

And we traded stories as emotional currency, as a way of reestablishing contact and closeness.

And so, you know, so in that situation you learn to tell stories.

And I've done it completely unconsciously with my own children.

In fact, we play a game where everybody in the room comes up with an object or a thing or even just an idea and you all say them out loud at the same time and then people take turns knitting them together into a narrative that makes sense.

It's a great car game for children.

You can do it, unlike I Spy, you can do it indefinitely because it's attractive to children and it's attractive to adults.

No, you learn to do them first time.

You learn effectively basic improv.

And that also, by the way, is still part of the curriculum of the schools that I went to.

You know, just that kind of...

baseline ability to start from a question to which you don't know the answer and knit a response that's plausible.

And when we had Boris Johnson as our prime minister, I was watching him do all the things I learned how to do.

Just make up a plausible answer to a question you have no idea about.

I did not go to boarding school.

I went to a minor or mid-grade UK London public school, but not a boarding school.

Oh, yes, directly.

Extremely elegantly and openly.