I want to be a young dad. By 25 or 26 I want to see myself like married or start looking for a family.

I mean I look at my dad. He was twenty when he started having a family and he was always the coolest dad. He did everything for his kids and he never made us feel like he was pressured. I know that it must be a great feeling to be a guy like that.

The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful often urgent and essentially life-affirming but they are all performances of courage and honesty.

Let me start with Yahoo. As we meet today a Chinese citizen who had the courage to speak his mind on the Internet is in prison because Yahoo chose to share his name and address with the Chinese Government.

I think what I would say to my younger self and probably to younger just starting-out writers is that a lot of times you're just afraid to put yourself out there and it's uncomfortable because it's working up the courage to do something to push yourself to do those things.

We had every problems starting a big top could have. The tent fell down on the first day. We had problems getting people into the shows. It was only with the courage and arrogance of youth that we survived.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26 which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

A life lesson for me is how do you muster the courage to take on a new risk? Whether it's starting up a business or taking on a new project or expedition. I think the risks that we take are all relative to the risk-taker.

How many women have the courage to start properly with a cold cold bath early in the morning? I jump in throw the water cold as ice and after the first plunge I am happy.

But we got up there and decided to stick to this mix of power chords and funk and that's where it really started for us. In having the courage to take that decision. To take a gamble not just with our music but our lives.