Uncle Vladimir said: recount a dream, lose a reader. But for those of us who remain committed transcendental idealists the opposite remains the case. Indeed, I’d sooner hear about someone’s dreams than anything else. I’d far rather they took me by the hand and led me through the warped corridors and funhouse apartments of their dreamscape, than bored me with details of their propery acquisitions.   More...

A migrainous day: suitably, perhaps, as the research I’m doing at the moment jumps off from Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings – a book that deeply impressed me when I first read it, and continues to do so – and he is notoriously a sufferer. My mother had skull-splitting three-day migraines that sent her, reeling like a Mafioso gunned down, to the mattresses. Mine are somewhat different, and only appeared after I’d banged my head on a wall in frustration during a holiday in Lanzarote.   More...

Last week, sitting for three days in a studio booth in Queen’s Park recording the talking book of Liver with the very able Patch McQuaid of ID Audio. We got a rhythm going: reading, fluffing a line, he picks me up intuitively – on we go. Ah, but the voices! The croaking piss-artists of Foie Humain, the Schwitzer-Deutsch of Leberknödel, the snappy ad-men of Prometheus and the whining junkies of Birdy Num Num.   More...

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...

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.   More...

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?’   More...

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.   More...

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?   More...