So, five cookies for £2.99 from Millies (three milk chocolate, two white chocolate and lemon – if you’re asking), and then the 16.30 to Bath Spa. In Bath, I ate at Waggaponytail, with all the other little pink-lip-glossed Tamsins and Georgies, oh, a girl like me loves a noodle bar, so she does. One gripe: the green tea was the temperature of dishwater. What is it with me and tea nowadays? It does arouse the most fearful indignation in me, the way that on the trains they now hand you a cup of hot – not boiling water – and then the tea bag. Am I the only one, or is this a disgusting approximation of the national beverage, dictated to us by the Health & Safety ninnies?

I digress.

Topping’s bookshop in Bath is owned and run by the redoubtable Robert Topping, who was exiled from Waterstone’s in Deansgate after protesting at the introduction of central buying. His two shops – in Bath and Ely – are everything good independents should be: home and welcoming, staffed by erudite and engaging booksellers. Last time I read there, I had people stretching away to either end of the shop, so had to perorate in the round. This time they’d thoughtfully enlisted the local church, St Michael’s-Without-Bath.

The curate was most keen that I not feel restrained within the sacred precincts from delivering my homily wholly unexpurgated. However, there was a quid pro quo: he would lead the extempore congregation in a small prayer before I began. I had no objection at all – after all, it was his gaff, and I’m a militant agnostic. Moreover, as he appealed to his Lord to aid and assist my creativity, I felt a great surge of scurrilousness building up in me, and became convinced that my satirical weapons were being mightily honed. Who knows, I may yet become a regular communicant.

Anyway, I read from the book, took some questions, then went off with my old mucker Nick Lezard, the critic, and my dad’s old friend the Reverend Colin MacGregor, for a meal at the Maharani across the road. The last time I ate there was in 1985 with the conga player from Kid Creole and the Coconuts, who was called something asinine like Coti Mundi. Why? Who the hell knows. The Coconuts may be long gone, but the Maharani is exactly the same: a still, brown eye at the centre of the world’s heliotrope vortex.

Then, on Saturday morning, I unfolded the Brompton, cycled to King’s Cross, folded it up again and put it – and me – on the train to Cambridge. The folding bike is perfect for this kind of day. After the Cambridge gig – organised by a very nice woman, Jo Browning Wroe, who was one of WG Sebald’s students at UEA, and attended the seminar he conducted immediately before his tragic death – I cycled back to the station, trained it to London, cycled from King’s Cross to Paddington, then trained it all the way to Swansea, where an equally nice man, Matt (Neil Morrisey’s partner in his Dylan Thomas-themed hotels and restaurants), drove me to the gig in Laugharne.

After the gig, I put the Brompton in the boot of a hire car and drove back to London, dropped the car at the hire place on the Kennington Road, unfolded the bike and prepared to cycle home through black 4am rain. Only to discover that the clip that holds the frame together had been worked free from the Brompton by my speedy passage the length of the M4 and was now locked in the boot of the hire car. But, such is the brilliance of the Brompton’s design, that by pulling hard on the handlebars I was still able to propel myself along.

What I’m trying to tell you here is sod the gigs – the biking was great.

I made the mistake of trying to think seriously about them for a while, and then gave up. When she asked me if I wore anything special to write in, I replied: ‘An orange jumpsuit modelled on those of the Guantánamo detainees, with “24-Hour Emergency Writer” blazoned between the shoulder blades.’ When she inquired as to whether I ate any special snacks while I was writing, I replied – without hesitation – ‘A foie gras entier is flown to me each week, direct from the Dordogne in a canister filled with liquid nitrogen. I eat it spread on a special sourdough toast baked for me by Fortnum’s.’ When she asked me if there was anything in my past that I regretted, I dead-panned: ‘I was born a hermaphrodite, and bitterly regret the operation that deprived me of my full set of primary female sexual characteristics.’

I wished the young woman from the FT no ill-will, but sometimes the absurdity of anatomising the writing life – which, to all intents and purposes is static and incapable of being observed – gets the better of me. I also managed to fudge my connections at Cambridge, and ended up trundling about the Fens for a while: up to Ely, then across to Bury-St-Edmunds. I’d never been there before; in the two years I lived in Suffolk I passed by on the ring road occasionally, faintly disturbed by the minatory towers of the sugar beet processing factories, the chthonic glow of their sour-sweet industry. But this time, I penetrated the ring road and found a beautiful Tudor and Medieval town, and a perfect little jewel of a Theatre Royal, complete with two circles, boxes, and a small empyrean painted on to the ceiling. The house manager had fallen off the stage into the pit the previous day, so my contract rider hadn’t been adhered to: no prawn sandwiches – what stale hell was this? They did, however, give me a freebie Mars bar after the gig.

So, I did my shtick; and the audience were warm – if heavy on the knitwear. I signed a couple of books, and left in a rainstorm so heavy that it looked as if milk were being poured over the Abbey. I’d been directed to the local Indian, which was housed in a Tudor building. They put me by the window, and the rain filtered in over my chana masala. At the next table, they were talking about the camcorder footage of Gavin on fire – and how screamingly funny it still was. I wish I could’ve seen it. Thence to the Angel Hotel and bed. I was up at 6.30 am, and donned my orange jumpsuit so I could start a little work on the second draft of my next book. Twenty-four-hour writer, indeed.

25.03.08

‘Oh, uh-huh, I guess. Is that how it’s spelt?’

A prophet in his own country etc, etc.

But I digress: I’m on what seems like a never-ending tour. It began last October when Ralph Steadman and I published Psychogeography; it’s now continuing on through the publication of my new novel, The Butt, and if all goes according to plan there will be a new work of fiction, Liver, out in November, with attendant public readings. In truth, the tour goes back further than this, back to the paperback publication of The Book of Dave and before that the hardback.

I’ll keep you posted on my not very regal progress – me, disposable razor, and Vitamin C capsules, such is the Rock God and his entourage. Last Saturday, it was Glasgow, something called Aye Write! A litfest – you guessed it. The Nuremberg rallies of the contemporary bourgeoisie. The audience listened, they asked me about psychiatry, heroin, whether I used a typewriter – the usual stuff.

Afterwards, I attended a book awards ceremony, together with my friend the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray. He was up for one – but pleased not to win. ‘It went to the youngest writer!’ He crowed. ‘That’s as it should be.’ The youngest writer, Dan Rhodes, had greying hair. Hmmm.

At Glasgow Airport, the smokers have been corralled well away from the terminal since the terrible Islamist festival of Ramavan. Apart from these enhanced security measures, the only sign up was one advising travellers that ‘Heelys are not allowed in the Terminal’. Heelys being those skate shoes with built-in little wheels. What a drag, as Martin Amis so sagely remarks in his collection The Second Plane, boredom always dances attendance upon terror. Without heeling I am but an earthbound clod, striding on to the next gig.

WS
20.03.08

At the University Arts Centre everything is on offer: a museum full of ancient artefacts, a cinema with David Lynch’s Inland Empire playing, even a theatre offering Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry. Limber pubescent girls in iridescent leotards cascade over the varnished pine floorboards in the dance studio. It’s odd, this cultured oasis in a campus, which, if not exactly a concrete desert, nonetheless has an air of desuetude.

Having signed on with an agency to promote my books, I’m now sent off to venues like this. Aberystwyth — Britain’s own Ultima Thule. In the battered green room, I look at my ageing face surrounded by exposed lightbulbs, and Archie Rice looks back. It’s the end-of-the-pier show — and I’m the entertainer. Could it get worse? I’m tired, I certainly don’t feel like making anyone laugh or cry or emote in any way.

On stage, glum, gloomy, I start my schtick. I read a couple of short pieces, indulge in a flight of fancy; and then I feel it: the impossible-to-mistake sensation of empathy, beaming back at me from the darkened auditorium. Damn it! These people are on my side: they’re tired too — but they also want to enjoy themselves. They haven’t come to deride — but engage.

In the signing line after the reading, I find that the Aberystwyth folk are the chattiest, the most informed, the most acute I’ve come across for a while. I wouldn’t say I left the Arts Centre with a glow — that would be obscene — but as I freewheeled my folding bike back down the steep hill to town, I felt a definite unburdening of the spirit.

Deep in the small hours, through the open window of the Bellvue Hotel, I heard late-teen drunken ranting along the seafront: the boy indifferent, the girl hysterical. “Fuck you!” She cried, and then again, “Fuck you! Really, fuck you!”

In the morning, I found a single blood-stained white sock lying in the concrete pot on the promenade, which should have held a plant, but instead contained only this discarded apparel and a few fag butts. Perhaps this was the real Aberystwyth, and the nice people at the Arts Centre were in fancy, psychic dress?

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?

I digress, we were eating our ceviche, and I started chortling at my recollection of a line in Martin Amis’s novel The Information. When Amis’s protagonist – failed Modernist novelist Richard Tull – is mulling over famous, literary cases of impotence, he observes, apropos of the principal characters in George Eliot’s magnum opus: “And as for Casaubon and Dorothea, it must’ve been like trying to fit an oyster into a parking meter.”

I laughed, in part because I’ve always thought the image to be at once supremely just and totally outrageous — and therefore the very acme of the absurd; and also because Martin himself vouchsafed to me that he’d had it off Christopher Hitchens, in that charming way that writers admit to each other their little apropriations and, ah, thefts. Marc laughed, too, but only because he was certain that he’d heard the gag before — not the reference to Middlemarch, mind, but the insertion of the crustacean into the metal slot — although not attributed to either Amis or Hitchens.

Having decided that the image was altogether too fundamental to have been coined by any one person, we began to consider its aptness. Could one not say of impotence that it was, rather, like trying to fit a parking meter inside an oyster? And anyway, was it not also possible to imagine a parking meter into which it would be easy to shove one, two, and indeed many, many oysters? How would one feel, if one were to prise open an oyster, and find lying there, in its opalescent, pillowy flesh, a small — and yet beautifully formed — parking meter?

As to why all this should have occurred to me there, on Easter Island, at that time; it was because I’d made the mistake of taking Middlemarch away with me. Not having read English Literature at university (a solecism that, I am well aware, places me well beyond the pale so far as a goodly swath of that laughable community “English literary critics” are concerned), I had never read Eliot before. Coming to her prose in middle age, I was finding it tough going: the lengthy animadversions, the faintly pious authorial voice, the suffocating religiosity of her heroine. In all, I was finding reading Middlemarch like … Well, like trying to fit a parking meter inside an oyster.

27.02.07

I’ve no idea whether it will help the viewer to get the frenetic, sweaty, minatory, gloomy atmosphere of the book — but perhaps it will. I wanted this passage to take the reader by the scruff of the neck and shove his or her face in the great, steaming, two-millennium-old pile of human shit that is London. I wanted it to carry them along on the crest of a collapsing wave of fin de siecle urbanity, as it broke on the sharp reef of the present. I wanted … oh, but, what the hell, who gives a damn what I wanted.

What I will say, is that after I’d finished doing the filming, with two charming young publicists from Penguin, I went to the Algerian Coffee Stores and bought two kilos of yerba mate. Why have I become addicted to drinking this South American herbal mulch? I think the answer is obvious.

Toodle-pip!

“Many commiserations are due to the four-man Polar Quest team who have become the first British military expedition to reach the South Pole since Captain Scott’s men in 1912. The plan is for the combined Royal Navy and Marines personnel to hold a small remembrance service at the Pole, in honour of their fallen hero, before hauling their 20-stone sledges back to the Patriot Hills on the perimeter of the continent. But if they really want to succeed in emulating Scott, there’s only one course open to them: holing up in a tent, in a blizzard, while starving and freezing to death. When it comes to replicating one of the great, incompetent follies of British imperialism, their colleagues in the RAF Southern Reach team, have already outperformed Polar Quest by not getting to the Pole at all. These icy airmen should feel nothing but stupefying pride at their heroic — and very British — feat of failure.”

You will, of course, recall the ditty, which has such lines as “Rhythm is a dancer / It’s a source companion / You can feel it everywhere”, as well as the marvellous simile “It’s as serious as cancer”. Approaches were duly made to the song’s publishers, but, while acknowledging that requests for the cancer riff had been made in the past, the permission for further use was rebuffed. I was somewhat gobsmacked: the entire lyric is freely available in this medium and Conjunctions, while not entirely recondite, has a circulation of a few thousand at best. Concerned for the forthcoming West End production of “Scale” (what would we do without “Rhythm is a Dancer”? It’s as if Shakespeare was refused permissions by Plutarch), I wrote to the music publishers again; and now, here’s the sting: a very kind person called Mikki Francis (male, female, Buffy fan?), did secure the Snap permission — however, irony of ironies, her email to me was “tucked” behind her previous one in what I later learned is called a “conversation thread”.

Somehow I’d managed to hit the button that activates this “facility” in my email programme. When I deactivated it, hundreds of unanswered emails came back to view: the fag-ends of exchanges, at the time misapprehended, that had led to injurious consequences. Indeed, the conversational-thread bollocks had been going for months, and had I not fallen victim to it, I wouldn’t be here, in a web shack in Spitzbergen, eating cloudberry jam, while a narwhal treats my fungus with his horn. I may never make it back for the play’s opening night, still, rhythm is a dancer…