I’d spoken to one of her colleagues on the phone and asked if they – the chiropodists – would be able to remove this growth from beneath the little toe on my left foot: “I’ve tried the proprietary stuff from the chemist’s,” I explained, “but the thing is difficult to reach, and no matter how much I coat it, pick it and then rub it with an emery board, it just goes on getting bigger. And besides, I think I can hear it at night, speaking from the bottom of the bed, mouthing platitudes about the national debt and the lack of any alternatives and core Liberal beliefs. Moreover, I’m worried about infecting my kids.”

Sadie’s colleague assured me that Sadie would do the business and booked me an appointment – but when it came to the crunchy dermis, it turned out that she was far from willing to make the cut. “There’s no point,” she averred. “There’s about a 50% chance of success, and as 50% of them fall off within a year of their own accord, it hardly seems worthwhile.”

“But what about contagion?” I asked.

“They aren’t actually contagious,” she said, “that’s a bit of myth. The virus is like the herpes one that causes cold sores – it’s everywhere all the time, it’s just a matter of it finding a chink in your immune system. Verrucas thrive between upper and lower layers of the skin where the body’s immune system can’t detect them, so the thing to do is actually to irritate the skin beneath the verruca so that it mobilises antibodies to repel the foreign body.”

“Hm,” I hm-ed, “so the verruca virus is like Liberalism, it’s everywhere all the time but you can’t see it and it has no real impact on Government policy until it manages to get in between the layers of popular and parliamentary sovereignty, whereupon it will grow into an opportunistic Cleggy-shaped thing?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Sadie concurred.

“The size of it is fucking huge!” I screeched, “and it looks like an overgrown public schoolboy!”

“Well, as I say, you’ve a 50% probability of its coalition falling apart within the year – and even if I did remove it surgically there’s a chance you could develop something worse.”

“Do you mean – ?”

“Yes, Simon Hughes. Now, that’ll be £28 please – we accept credit or debit cards, and, of course, cash.”

The worst thing about the situation was that I didn’t even particularly want to see his breasts – I just spoke on impulse and out of boredom. Not, you appreciate, proximate boredom – that’s for kids – but a deep, gnawing, existential kind of boredom. Besides, he was reading The Times in a way that convinced me he was just as afflicted with tedium vitae as I. I thought: I’ll hand over the 35 quid, he’ll take off his tie – striped blue and lighter blue – and unbutton his shirt – white, not especially fresh – then simply part the sides so that I can ogle for a few seconds or minutes his slack, sparsely-haired moobs. That’ll be it: no fuss, no drama – I doubted that anyone else in the carriage would even notice.

Of course, if I’d paused for a second to think about my proposition I would’ve realised that it was just another attempt on my part to indulge in the pornography that swells in every moist and hidden crevice of contemporary society. Yes, that’s the thing: ever since a revelatory encounter with the late Andrea Dworkin, in Manhattan, in the late 1990s, I’ve accepted that pornography, far from being a harmless little vice, is in fact a crime – and a crime with victims like any other. Granted, it seemed unlikely that this man was in danger of experiencing himself as a sexual object (indeed, he might even have welcomed this if I’d put it to him nicely), but there it was: I was objectifying him.

The strange thing was that as he became more and more irate, and threatened to call the conductor – I found myself getting aroused. I suppose you can guess how it all ended… But then, I thought to myself as I zipped up my flies, smarmed my hair, shut the toilet door, and descended to the platform at Bath Spa, in my end is my beginning – surely a sentiment Pope Benedict would concur with?

Not that I wish to be dismissive of the audiences who turn out for my readings, or the journalists who trouble to interview me – I value them all. I cleave to Cocteau’s view of the artist, that we are all hermaphrodites engaged in feats of parthenogenesis: we inseminate ourselves, gestate our mind-children then deliver them on to A4 beds. We raise them, and eventually – when they’re hulking and hirsute – we load up their belongings, drive them to another town, buy them an electric kettle, open a bank account for them and cut them loose. It’s not our fault if they subsequently end up as crack whores – or, worse, provincial solicitors.

So, the audiences and the journalists in Bristol, Bath, Brighton and Birmingham are effectively foster parents, or beadles, or possibly “moral tutors” (which is what the member of the academic staff charged with student welfare was called in my day); because it is unto them that the fully-grown mind-child is delivered. And just as it’s no longer the writer’s responsibility as to what becomes of his books, so these transitional figures may fold, spindle and mutilate them as they will.

I digress – although not without purpose, the Dyke also features in the book I’ve just published, Walking to Hollywood. What goes around … Anyway, instead of taking the spur to the Dyke car park in towards the golf club we found the road closed with a police barrier and a bored-looking WPC standing in front of it. “You can’t come this way,” she said when I’d wound down the window, “haven’t you heard about the body found on the golf course?” Well, no – but what none of us Londoners had heard of before was cops so keen to impart. In the Smoke they wouldn’t give you the time of day, but down here in Miss Marpleville we got all the dope: according to the WPC, said corpse was “badly charred” and – here her voice dropped to a conspiratorial undertone – “the feet had been chopped off”.

I suggested it might’ve been that most loathsome of crimes, an “honour killing”, but the WPC looked at me as if I were a fool. Maybe she thought it was the Devil what done it.

I can’t say I ever exactly warmed to his publically cultivated image: yet underneath the dandiacal shtick – which was time- as well as shop-worn – there lurked a sensitive, kind, tormented man. On top of addiction (itself a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder), Seb was riddled with the gamut of repetitive counting, hand-washing and magical thinking. He took smack because he was an addict, for sure, but I think he also used it to silence this psychic Babel.

He climbed on and off the wagon many of the rest of us managed to ride – but in this there was no disgrace. Less easy to take was the attitudinising – at least when you understand, as I believe I do to my marrow, that once someone has crossed the line, far from being a lifestyle choice (albeit of an arid and unprofitable kind) intoxication is nought save a pathology. I saw Seb as trapped inside a performance that he was powerless to give up – one that did for him in the end.

We joined the cortege at the top of Lower Regent Street and followed the horse-drawn hearse past Bates, the hatters. There was a representative sample of the existentialist inhabitants of the inner city: suited and booted sub-Goths twirling skull-topped canes, demi-whores in corsets with BDD (Breast Dismorphic Disorder). Stephen Fry offered me a large, soft, cool, moist hand and greetings, and then observed that we were unlikely to see the likes of such a funeral again in Soho. Unkindly, I suggested that he might prefer us to be dropping like gaudy flies, if spectacle was the object.

In fact, Stephen’s address to the mourners was measured, calm, only a little wry, and quite moving. He didn’t play to the gallery who look upon the likes of Sebastian Horsley as some kind of freak show. Seb was predeceased by a few weeks by Michael Wojas, ex-proprietor of the Colony Room, the private members club where he often hung out. I knew Michael back in the day, and used him – quite unashamedly – as the model for the barman, Hilary Edmonds, in my story Foie Humain from Liver.

As I said in the story, the real tragedy of these Soho denizens was not that they belonged to some kind of avant garde, but that the cultural revolution they spearheaded was carried forward without them: as outside in Old Compton Street everyone got gayer and happier, inside the Colony Room everyone got sadder and older. Wojas died of chronic alcoholism at 53, Horsley of a heroin overdose at 47. There’s no way you can paint up either death as anything but miserable and futile.

My tiny netbook had burnt out after I’d stupidly shut it while it was shutting down then left it to burn out its mother board. Or so Nomi, the guy in the local cyber-café-cum-phone-unlocking hangout, told me. He ordered a new mother board from Hong Kong to replace it, and when the job was done (160 shitters), we checked that it booted up and I tucked it away in my rucksack.

But on the train the keyboard obstinately refused to work at all; disaster: I had two pieces to file before I got beyond internet range in 36 hours. I called Toby the computer man: “Oh,” he said, “it sounds like this guy failed to reconnect the keyboard, it’s a simple enough job but you have to open the machine and obviously you need to know what you’re doing.”

Obviously I wouldn’t know what I was doing: I orbit the world of handiness in a space station of cackhandedness banged together out of old 2x4s and six-inch nails. Some years ago I reached the tipping point and had to acknowledge that I would probably never be able to put up a set of shelves or flambé a crème brûlée. I concur with Dr Johnson that to be unhandy is in itself a form of stupidity, and although I once – to please my wife – spent something like a fortnight installing a new toilet-roll holder (I did drilling and everything!), when she returned home from her holiday, she tartly observed that it was the wrong way round.

When I came off the phone and was sitting there gently weeping, the young man sitting in the seat behind me leant over and said, “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation and I think I might be able to fix your computer.” Yes, bizarre – but true: a good computer Samaritan. A Phillips screwdriver was quickly obtained from the train guard and Alex (for this was his name) set to work. I couldn’t bear to look, given that manipulations like this seem like neurosurgery to me. Within what seemed to be a few minutes, Alex had done it and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief, safe in the knowledge that it would have another pretentious art catalogue essay by Will Self after all.

Alex wasn’t just a whizz at mending computers, he was also a soon-to-be-qualified psychiatric nurse who was thinking of going on to qualify in law so he could act as an advocate for mentally ill people. Moreover, he also grew all his vegetables on allotment near his home in Glasgow, and liked to go bare-bones backpacking around the Highlands. Indeed, rather like Bruno who took me down the London sewers a few weeks ago, he was one of those young men who seem to move lightly and efficiently around the world, and to me – who when young moved heavily and inefficiently around the world, trashing bits of it along the way – this seems far more of a miracle than a pathetic little netbook.

Which brings us to the sewers, which I descended into last evening in the charming company of Bruno Rinvolucri of Resonance FM. Bruno makes a habit of this sort of thing – and in one way it’s easy to see why: there is something INCREDIBLY strange about walking 40 feet below the surface of London in a huge shit-smeared culvert; but in another way, he has to be the most psycho geographer of us all. We started at Brixton Water Lane, where we descended into the culvert that the lost River Effra now runs in. This was a fairly stiff, near-knee-high current of dirty-dish-water-coloured fluid (it smelt of old dish water as well). After a few hundred yards we reached an inflow that made the slithery progress feel distinctly vertiginous; and shortly after that a chamber opened up to the right, and we descended another ladder into a deeper, wider-bore and drier sewer, which we followed all the way to Clapham North.

Stalactites of calcified toilet paper with ancient sanitary towels trapped in their convolutions slow-dripped from the ceiling; cars hammering over the manhole covers up above sent reverberations booming along the tube; our headtorches struck weird glissading light-pulses across the curved courses of stock bricks (which had remained paradoxically fresh and yellow in this “unpolluted” environment). The smell! Why didn’t they tell us: dish water, yes, braided with excrement – mephitic beyond noisome.

Bruno, who is as engaging as you would expect someone who has a passion for this sort of thing to be (ex-rickshaw driver, nascent physical anthropologist, favours rooms to let for £25, so if you have a queer space you need tenanted in the Oxford area get in touch), confessed towards the end of our 1.5 mile slosh that when he first began going down the sewers he found it pretty scary; furthermore that one or two of the people he’d brought down for his Resonance recordings had also freaked out. Then there came a terrible noise like a giant burp or fart-afflatus from the murk up ahead, where the tunnel widened into a high-colonic cathedral. Bruno explained that if we continued down this gently sloping chamber of shiterrors it would begin “to look as if there were a wall of water ahead of us … ” and it was out of this that these great eggy burps were coming.

“Actually,” Bruno vouchsafed as we began to inch our way back up to the surface, like Wellsian Morlocks in denim, “when you smell the rotten eggs it’s probably time to get out.” Had he, I wondered, ever spoken to the actual sewermen about these odd journeys beneath the city’s raddled hide. “Oh, no,” he replied, “I think they’d be pretty down on what I do – after all, they wear full oxygen kits and dry suits … ”

Now he told me! But, thankfully, the manhole cover swung wide and we ascended into the street I cycle down almost every week on my way to Blockbuster. The fantastical and chthonic elided effortlessly with the mundane: my favourite experience. Half an hour later, we were eating in Speedy Noodle back in Brixton.

Anyway, there we were, looking frumpy – with the exception of Mrs S and the ever-dapper nephew – in among the slap-headed and pig-tailed balletomanes, when during the first interval a young woman came up and introduced herself as being in the press department at the British Library. “We’ve just acquired JG Ballard’s archive,” she said, “as you probably know, and I thought I’d come and say hello given that some of your letters to him are in it.”

Well, I’m sure you know what Mr Nasty said to that: “Oh, really, I want them back.” Jason Shulman, who was with us, pointed out that I didn’t physically own the letters any more – only the rights to their reproduction – but I still felt uneasy and appropriated. A discussion on the merits of biography followed. Certainly, the biographers of the living are the worst: like anticipatory ghouls waiting for the car crash to happen, but there’s also an argument to be made against literary biography in general. After all, while the lives of individuals who have linked the collective to the individual experience (politicians, soldiers, campaigners etc) offer a prima facie case for the understanding of social and political change, it’s difficult to think of writers – who, for the most part sit typing – as of having the same torque. Not that I don’t read literary biography myself – I do, although guiltily, because for another writer it’s simply a species of pornography: watching someone else beating the creative meat.

Which brings us back to Michael Clark, who came on and did a brief solo jig, and then a curtain call dressed in a banana suit out of Leigh Bowery by … well, a banana.

Lying in bed of a late night, having screened out the drunks wending their way back from the pub and the agonised ecstasy of copulating foxes, and the traffic on the main road, and the bellowing of late jets hunkering down over the metropolis, I was still assailed by that “System armed!”. In a world of intrusions this was one too far. I took it up with my neighbour. “Yeah, yeah,” he agreed, “it is aggravating, but I got the car like that and I can’t figure out how to get rid of it … but I’ll try, really.”

Somehow I don’t think he made that much of an effort; after all, the “System armed!” is of a piece with his weapon dog, and the bars in front of his front door, and the CCTV system, and the fact that he appears not to work regular hours … Still, live and let live, I say: he’s always cheerful, and seems oddly to be a steadying influence on the younger and more feral yoof who wander up and down the street, deranged by their yearning for the unobtainable and their surfeit of boredom. As for “System armed!” over the weeks I’ve come to integrate it into my mental life. “System armed!” the car croaks, and I think to myself, I’m glad – truly I’m glad.

It was typically insensitive of me to call in a vulpine strike on Jah Thatch, who, as everyone knows, was only the passive instrument of historical change rather than its initiator. As for foxes, who but an absurd and sentimental urbanite, who refuses to acknowledge that what’s on the end of his fork is an abused fowl, would characterise these vicious and unprincipled creatures as the vanguard of the revolution? Perhaps now, at long last, after the tragic attack on the baby girls in East London, the long-awaited pogrom against London’s foxes will finally be initiated?

And who better to don the red coat and tootle “Tally-Ho!” than my own local Labour MP Kate Hoey. After all, it was Hoey who chose a superb opportunity to bury bad news, by announcing on the very day that Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by armed police at Stockwell tube station in her constituency, that she would be assuming the chairmanship of the Countryside Alliance. Obviously, it’s impractical to hunt urban foxes on horseback, but I can see no reason for not putting the many hundreds of so-called “weapon dogs” who roam the parks hereabout to some sort of useful employment.

And if not the dogs, then why not their owners as well, many of whom are second-generation unemployed – the sons and daughters of people who lost their jobs during the great culling on the 1980s. It would seem an elegant solution to both problems to set these folk to the maintenance of dog packs and the manufacture of hunting tackle. Which brings us neatly full circle: eliminating foxes and unemployment with a single measure. Of course, it leaves Thatcher still alive – but then that’s a given, n’est ce pas?