I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village.

When I'm in town on Sundays I sometimes go down to the Central Bar in the East Village to watch English football. But my natural inclination now is to get in the car with my wife and kids and get out of town.

Remote villages and communities have lost their identity and their peace and charm have been sacrificed to that worst of abominations the automobile.

We need to become good citizens in the global village instead of competing. What are we competing for - to drive more cars eat more steaks? That will destroy the world.

It used to happen in villages and towns in China that they would have - I guess you'd call them beauty contests - where all of the women of a particular village or town would be seated behind these screens or curtains with only their feet showing.

So we just kind of created our own thing and that's part of the beauty of Athens: is that it's so off the map and there's no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene that it just became its own thing.

The magic kit we developed with Idea Village is an extraordinary success in 40 000 stores across America. The TV commercial we shot for it has produced amazing results - unbelievable.

I've had some amazing people in my life. Look at my father - he came from a small fishing village of five hundred people and at six foot four with giant ears and a kind of very odd expression thought he could be a movie star. So go figure you know?

When I walked to school in the mornings I would start out alone but would pick up four other boys along the way. We would set out together after school across the village green.