"At a gallery dinner in Berlin a while back, the artist sitting next to me asked where I was from, originally. He was English and trying to place my accent, I think. ‘Oh, I’m from a shithole,’ I said, fondly remembering that small, rough-edged town in Yorkshire. ‘Everyone’s from a shithole,’ said the artist. But he was in his fifties and had no doubt benefitted from the same free higher education – a lifeline of sorts to relatively ambitious, misfit, non-monied, art-minded people from regional towns – that I had, that my parents had, but that vanished during the late 1990s and has become progressively the preserve of non-shithole people ever since. I didn’t ask, but that artist probably doesn’t teach, or spend much time around emerging artists."