He said Trump had been "very gracious about Mrs May" but some of his advisers have long memories about disobliging things said by UK government ministers "There are some fences that need to be mended... actually I could help with something very, very important," he told LBC Radio.
"I've been getting a lot of different information about the ways I can try and get that right, and Michael really just jogged my memory about a few things I was doing a couple of years ago, more so with Greg Chappell, and I suppose taking me back to the basics of just getting someone throwing the ball slowly and making sure I was getting myself in the right position.
"It allows us to make observations that deal exclusively with the aesthetics – we don't have to worry about things like texture memory".
As was true of his entire body of work, each note and each word on the record is precisely placed but not preciously so, with the artist harnessing a miraculous backing band in service of songs about mortality, memory and things left behind.
People's memories last a minute these days about things like that.
But the princess's visit and her talk about banishment and memory, of things that were over and would not come back, and - he stopped writing now and sighed - her saying the name, saying it as though it were still vividly present somewhere within reach, all these things guided his tone as he wrote.
"Ives is often about things recalled," he said, "or memories or visions fetched out of some difficult place".
"I will talk to you about memories and things like that, and I think we should keep it like that.
Think about the memory or thing you are writing about.
The expert presumably connects selected features of his current visual experience to things stored in memory about pink-spotted flycatchers, securing an appropriate match between features in the experience and features in the memory store.
