Sometimes

Sometimes."He thought at one time that he might be a rock star He taught himself the guitar a bit He sang a bit. He loved the "cheap end of disco music - Sister Sledge, Boney M - before graduating to Pink Floyd, "and writing their names all over my denim jacket, and all that rubbish".Steven is still music-mad, and spends most of his money on CDs. He says his first passion was not for the theatre or anything, but music. He used to have this wind-up gramophone, he says, which he called his "thirty bob" because it cost him thirty bob, and he carried it everywhere with him It may have been a kind of early ghetto-blaster.

Our house was one of those standard, Sixties, Lego-shaped things.' His mother, Dorothy, is an office worker, while his father, Malcolm, is a builder He has one sister, Linda, who is now a childminder. "I think it might have been a fairly pretty place once, with 13 pubs on the high street. But then it became one big Sixties housing development, and very new-towny. He is truly disappointed, I think.He was born and brought up in Sawston, which is just outside Cambridge He feels no great attachment to the place. He says with great regret that he has to pick Martha up from somewhere shortly. I say, if you want to come back afterwards to see my Waitrose bag collection, you'd be most welcome.

I add that I told this to my own son once, and it satisfied his curiosity until he was at least 17 Steven says he knows this particular Waitrose well It's where he does his weekly shop. I tell him that if his daughter ever asks where God lives, for example, he might want to say he lives over Waitrose on the Holloway Road, with six angels who act as a remote for the telly, and a cat called Louise. We agree that children are wonderful, because they can be so easily duped. Martha's brilliantly girly and invites her father to endless mock little tea parties.Martha's a bit upset at the moment, though, because her friend Jessica has told her fairies don't really exist Steven has had to convince her that maybe they do. You've had me already.'" He says he cried when his daughters were born.