I heard you broke a string?

Yes, but that's an occupational hazard.

It's what you do next that's important.

In Toulouse we would occasionally allow people to sleep in the chapel, upstairs in the office. We allowed Tadzo to do that for quite a long time.

He was an illegal immigrant: he'd turned up with a passport photocopied on an irregularly shaped piece of what looked like grey blotting paper.

He had no French and no English but pretty soon he'd taught himself French with the aid of a Rumanian Bible and a copy of John's gospel in French.

He had toured with a Rumanian orchestra playing double bass but like lots of the homeless people he was a great guitarist.

I'm a big fan of Bartok's Rumanian folk dances suite so I jumped at the chance of learning some of Tadzo's music.

Then, one day a string broke on my guitar. I reached for the case for the spare set.

"No, no, I repair it."

And that's what he did - he repaired the string with fuse wire. Waste not, want not.

Later on, Tadzo got arrested by the border police on his wedding day. At the ceremony itself.

Later still, he was killed in a car crash.

Ever busked before?

Why, yes. Quite a lot really.

When I was living in Paris, I had a market stall in Villejuif. There was a bloke who went with me who was meant to be keeping me company and encouraging me. It was a Bible stall. This man spent all his time arguing with me and he got quite animated and sometimes people would stand and watch. Of course, he was doing the arguing, not me. Theological points, mainly. Still, he did introduce me to tarte tatin, so that was good.

We hardly ever sold any Bibles or anything except when I had the idea of gift wrapping the things in the runup to Christmas so I didn't really feel I was letting the side down by sloping off with my guitar.

And people started throwing money. That felt quite nice so I just carried on. Gave that money to the Vitry church on top of the Bible sales money. It was quite a lot of money really.

What's it all about?

It's about the parable of the talents.

I gave ten pounds to all the people in our service in Raglan on Sunday 2nd May 2010.

They had to go away and make as much money as they could with their ten pounds.

I'm supposed to get my dough back on 5th October,

As for me, I'm getting a sign made with "busking for Raglan Baptist" on it along with the church website address: http://www.raglanbaptistchurch.org.uk/

I'm going to set out with my guitar in August after a couple of dry runs at the school fete and the music festival. The money I make, I'm going to reinvest in petrol and food and start from Abergavenny, going on to Brecon and then all points west.