A children’s TV presenter had hanged himself at Paddington Station and his body wasn’t found for six days. Grim, but then big city rail terminuses always are: the temporary repositories of vice and despair; gutters through which the pure waters of the provinces are sluiced into the urban cesspit. Paddington isn’t helped by being within yards of St Mary’s Hospital, where, in the 1890s, heroin was synthesised for the first time. The station always has this peculiar smacklight: diffuse, dreamy, brown, and desperate. In my 1993 story Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo, the adulterous lovers rendezvous close to Paddington, at Sussex Gardens. The antihero parks the eponymous Volvo by the needle exchange Portakabin on South Wharf Road. A woman has written into the site, apropos of this blog, and asks is there any part of my life that is unobserved, unrecorded? All I can say in reply – paternalistically, patronisingly, and now, illegally – is that you don’t know one half of one half of one ten-thousandth of it, love.   More...

I’m not sure if sauntering up the road to Clapham Books counts as ‘touring’, but what the hell. Ed, Nikki and Al are lovely, gentle people, who took over the lease of the bookshop where they once worked and are now doing their level best to make it work in difficult times. Clapham Books is my local bookshop – not, you understand, that I live in Clapham – that would be hell. I say they’re lovely gentle people, but frankly, have you ever met a bookseller who wasn’t? I mean, they can be introverted and cantankerous in my experience, but they’re seldom aggressive, and never psychopathic.   More...