LYMPNE CASTLE IS A GRAND OLD BUILDING IN KENT, IN THE southeast of England. It was owned by two rather aristocratic people – Harry and Deirdre Margary. They were very posh. We would write and record, and then they’d invite me in for a drink in the evening, and I’d go and have a little whisky before I went home. I remember working on this song there, even though we ended up finishing and recording it at Abbey Road.

We recorded a whole bunch of stuff at Lympne Castle. Why? I don’t know. I suspect because it was nearish to where we lived, on the way to Folkestone on the south coast. We took a mobile truck there, and we more or less went in and recorded the album Back to the Egg, so you’d get these kinds of slightly oddball things happening and oddball songs coming out. I’m a bit more purposeful these days than I was then. I was probably smoking a little too much wacky baccy at the time.

One of the things about Wings was this freedom to not make sense. Sometimes I just liked the words and I wasn’t bothered about making sense. ‘Say you don’t love him’ – that’s not from any real experience, it’s not like I was being jilted or cuckolded or anything; it was a device to get me into the song. ‘I’m getting closer to your heart.’ I’m also arriving, driving towards where you are. ‘Keeping ahead of the rain on the road / Watching my windscreen wipers / Radio playing me a danceable ode’. ‘Hitting the chisel and making a joint’ . . . You knew your audience would be amused by those little references, because rolling joints was still a little bit underground at that time.

Sometimes you just like a word, so you try and find an excuse to put it in. I remember Linda telling me a story about how when she was a kid, she was a fan of nature, just like I was, and she would look under stones to find a lizard or a newt, which she would call a ‘salamander’. I loved the idea that in her world it was ‘salamander’ – much more exotic. Salamanders have a mythical aspect, born in fire, so that’s how the salamander made its way in.

A song like this might be thought of as a collage. I put things together that I’d seen or heard, and it had been around for a few years before we recorded it. I seem to remember there being a sign along the road somewhere: ‘Beware Cattle’. And there might have been bullet holes in the signs, because guys sniped at them for target practice, so I thought, ‘Cattle beware . . . Gluing my fingers together / Radio play me a song with a point.’ You know, not everything needs to have a point. A song is kind of a construction job, so I’ve done my usual thing of just sort of assembling it all and taking it somewhere.

It’s no accident that one of my hobbies at school was woodworking. When we lived in Scotland, I made a table with glue only, no nails. It was very basic; I drew it and I bought the wood. I would sit at the kitchen table when the kids were playing or getting ready for bed, and I would be chiselling, making these little dovetail joints. I’d finish each piece, a leg or a corner, and eventually I had a pile of them. One day I thought, ‘I’ve actually got to dare to put this together with glue.’ I got my Evo-Stik woodworking glue, put it all together, and it all worked except the last piece, which didn’t seem to fit. It was the cross-brace underneath, so I turned it upside down and it all fitted together. The table’s still standing.