It might sound like medieval hocum pocum but listening to his passion about working with nature rather than chemicals it's not long before you start thinking there might be method in this madness.
Thanks to my unusual, and by (conventional standards) hopelessly inadequate education, I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fat and hocum and books and art history and politics and music and film, and developing too a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered, and caught the light.