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.

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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.

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On the train to Cambridge, I took a call from a nice-sounding young woman at the Financial Times. She was to ask me questions for a questionnaire in her newspaper. I’d forgotten she was calling, and found myself temporarily discombobulated, ie when the questions began, their absurdity hit me like a freight train. ‘What is your favourite book?’ ‘Who is your literary inspiration?’ All that sort of reductive guff that puffs up the pages of prints too poor to source reporting anymore.

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It’s a bit like Bob Dylan’s never-ending tour, except that I’m not Bob Dylan and I haven’t done any adverts for Victoria’s Secret. (Actually, what is Victoria’s secret, that she has breasts and a vagina…? I only ask.) The closest I’ve ever been to Dylan’s birthplace of Hibbing, Minnesota, is Madison, Wisconsin. I was there the week the USAF was dropping ‘daisy-cutters’ on the Tora Bora caves - remember that? The city, like many US state capitals, is dominated by its Capitol, a scale model of the one in Washington. On my way to the bookstore to read to three orthodontically challenged Midwestern teenagers, I saw a flyer on reception advertising ‘Tonight at Civic Centre, Bob Dylon and his Band’. ‘Bob Dylon?’ I queried the girl on the desk, ‘don’t you mean Bob Dylan?’

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In Aberystwyth everyone is dressed up as a bunny or a nurse or a Hawaiian surfer, or has had their face painted Kabuki-white. It’s a university town, so some such carry on is only to be expected: yet the rituals of late adolescence seem to me so pronounced nowadays — the rut and glug, the prance and dance; the half-digested pap of US frat. Of course, this is my ritual of middle age: the carp and moan, the self-conscious distancing — as if afraid the knicker elastic of teenage abandonment is about to snap back in my face, yet again.

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Marc Quinn and I were dining on a ceviche of local fish at the Explora Hotel on Easter Island. I can’t tell you anything more about this, the remotest permanently inhabited place in the world, because I’m embargoed by the magazine that paid for my trip.

Ah yes, it is as if that famous Pacific island, a tiny bit of volcanic Connemara, cut off from the Hibernian main and flung down in tens of thousands of square miles of cobalt-blue Pacific, were ringed by giant statues; stone heads displaying a monumental ataraxy. And that were you to ask one of the gentle Polynesian natives who exactly these megaliths depicted, they were to reply: “We call that one ‘Conde’ that one ‘Nast’ and those two over there ‘World’ and ‘Traveller’.” But then, those who live by the junket also die by it, wouldn’t you say?

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A few words on this video clip. It was filmed — as should be obvious — in the back of a London cab, beginning as it crossed Vauxhall Bridge, continuing as it headed up through Victoria, and then continuing, as its route and the route taken by Dave Rudman, in the opening sequence of The Book of Dave, intersect. Finally, it comes to an end on the Edgware Road, where Dave’s fare is staring bemusedly at the promenading Arabs.

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I wrote this short gobbet for my regular London Evening Standard column on December 27. My editor there spiked it, I can only assume out of some knee-jerky patriotism that was banging around her brain. Nothing commands English attitudes more than the great, dying, effete behemoth that was Edwardian British Imperialism. I forgot about my gobbet for a couple of weeks, until the news that some new gang of idiots were traipsing off across Antarctica, valiantly “man-hauling” their equipment. So, in a spirit of futility, I’d like to share it with you:

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Happy New Year. What to say about my inability to blog? My blogstipation — if you will. Here, in London, the pissed old farts who run the print media have, belatedly and half-assedly, realised the significance of this new literary form. It’s true, guys, we’re all going down, or rather, the prints are going to fold. However, Marshall McLuhan was wrong, the medium is not the message; or rather, the idea that user-generated content is going to supplant the need for a caste of professional scribes is nonsense. Something like the newspaper will endure — but on the web. In the meantime, hacks on the London Guardian are required to enter the blogosphere, and, since their email addresses are also at the bottom of their print columns, engage in lengthy discussions with the iPod-heads. Those at the Telegraph even have to do their stuff as podcasts. Thank Nike the editors I work for haven’t sicked on to this. Yet.

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Curious happenings surround the publication of the stage version of my short story “Scale”. Commissioned by the redoubtable young impresario Ian Osborne, the play — adverted on its title page as “a musical regression in five acts” — features snippets of some of the most ephemeral pop hits of 1992, sung onstage by what the directions describe as “a highly mannered soprano”. Brad Morrow, who publishes a literary journal called Conjunctions, out of Bard College in the States, expressed an interest in running the first act of “Scale”, but after the proofs arrived I realised that we had not sought permission for the use of such lyrical gems as “Rhythm is a Dancer” by that once-popular beat combo Snap.

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