On a recent plane flight from Heathrow Airport, London, to Glasgow, I entered into a typical – but for all that grindingly depressing – altercation. I had been assigned the window seat, while the aisle was occupied by a man two decades younger and a head-and-a-half shorter than myself. I pointed this out to him and suggested that he might have some compassion for his elder, taller, better but he demurred, saying that he wanted to “get out quickly” at our destination. “What are you,” I snapped irritably, “a bloody brain surgeon?”

Of course, he wasn’t – he was a runner for Endemol, the TV production company responsible for such gems as Can Fat Teens Hunt? And to confirm that I was in a purgatorial transit, he and his little colleague in the middle seat spent the rest of the flight yakking nonsense, while slurping kiddie drinks – vodka and lemonade, the alcopops of a criminally extended teenage. However, in a way they did me a favour, because they forced me to contemplate: first my own weird hypocrisy – here was I, a fearless psychogeographer, ever-determined to assault the conventions of mass-transit systems, yet still falling prey to the most blinkered of herd instincts – and then, latterly, the view from the window.

It was a night flight, but even by day viewing the British Isles from the air can be a problematic endeavour: they’re too damn small, and more often than not covered in cloud, like an ancient dessert submerged in whipped cream that’s going off. At least, that’s what I like to tell myself. When I grope back through the frayed card index of my memory, I do come across startling prospects I’ve experienced from the air: the west of Ireland, spread out below, a green counterpane bejewelled with tiny lochs, the snow-bound Orkney Islands, streaked black-and-white like killer whales in the hammered lead of the Pentland Firth.

But what marks these sights out is their singularity – they are not what you expect of Britain, and especially England, its unmade bed of a landscape cluttered with human leftovers. Moreover, they are views I experienced when I – if not the world – was still young. Still, there I was, and rather than listen to the he-wank, she-wank talk of my travelling companions, I decided to garner what I could from the darkling empyrean, the bejewelled cities of the plain – like inversions of the Milky Way – and the metropolises along our route: Birmingham, Manchester, then Glasgow itself, which seemed like transparent jellyfish, sparking with unknowable sentience.

What is it about flying? Why is it that what must, by any reasonable estimation, be the most exciting and extreme, technologically mediated experience any of us are ever likely to have – apart, that is, from radical surgery – is hedged round with such ineffable tedium vitae? Getting into a titanium tube? Being hurled by vast jet engines six miles high, then impelled down an Aeolian slalom into another time zone? Why not squabble over the aisle seat, bury yourself in Grisham wood pulp, goggle at the pixellated manikins cavorting on the back of the seat in front of you, or plug your ears with soft rock – do anything, in short, to avoid being fully conscious of this revolutionary, quintessentially Modernist experience: the 600mph, hundreds of miles wide vantage of a superhero – or a god.

My hunch is that the way in which every aspect of air travel is trammelled by the ineffably dull – tedious airport architecture, monotonous muzak, anodyne announcements, superfluous consumer opportunities – is the result of an unconscious collective denial. After all, if flight crew wore winged helmets, and “The Ride of the Valkyries” came blasting over the PA as the plane picked up speed on the runway, then, when the oily behemoth slipped the surly bonds of gravity, the captain cried: “Weeeee!”, the latent anxieties of every passenger would be unleashed. Even if we survived the flight, we’d probably land determined never to do it again: “Flying? What a trip! Once is enough for me.” And the whole go-round of work-consume-travel-die would grind to a halt.

As it is, plane flight is the most intense juxtaposition of the banal and the sublime available to humanity: we sit, belted in, eating dry-roasted peanuts, and veering between contemplating our own unavoidable mortality, and the bad karma of the person sitting next to us – it’s bad enough to be working on Can Fat Teens Hunt? but to die working on it, that, like, sucks. We sit, cramped (and in my case, thanks to the teeny-rotters, with my knees pressed into my eye sockets), while just beyond two layers of Plexiglas the very curvature of the earth can be glimpsed.

It’s all enough to make anyone philosophic – except, that is, a bloody brain surgeon.

29.12.07

In July, when the ban on smoking in public buildings was introduced in England, I was in Brazil, a country where men are men (although often they have the secondary sexual characteristics of women), and they like to smoke cigars the size of Amazonian trees. They smoke them in restaurants, they smoke them in offices – they smoke them anywhere they damn well please. It’s as difficult to imagine a smoking ban in Brazil as it is a moratorium on commercial logging.

When I left Brazil, I went to the US, a country where a smoking ban has been in place for so long now that the inveterate nicotinistas have fully adapted. Setting to one side the – possibly apocryphal – tale of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg trying to have Keef Richards arrested for smoking on stage during a Rolling Stones gig at Madison Square Garden, you only have to wander the Manhattan streets for a few minutes to see the future of smoking – and how well it works. Purpose-built puffing booths, chatty, coughy colloquia at the foot of office blocks, trim uptown girls skipping along Fifth Avenue, a Hermes scarf over one shoulder, a smoky pashmina slung across the other. The American tobacco culture has rolled with the Puritanical punches, and survived.

Back in Blighty, I found a curiously unembattled smoking fraternity: we had seen the ban coming, and mostly made our peace with it. The powers-that-be had already launched trial blitzkriegs on Ireland – north and south – Scotland and Wales, so nobody was in any doubt about the consequences. I suspect the majority of smokers were like me, and accepted the ban as a fait accompli. After all, once the tipping point had been reached, and well over half the adult population no longer indulged, only a dumb bear squatting in the Forest (Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco) could reasonably expect them to put up with our shit-laden breath.

There were also those who, quite sensibly, looked to a ban as a means of assisting them to break off their affair with La Divina Nicotina once and for all. So there was little dissent, apart from the usual suspect “libertarians” banging on about their “rights”, and a few crypto-licensing agents, who inveigh against any measure that constrains an industry that derives the vast majority of its income from addicts. However, the trade had already been softened up by the timely introduction of 24-hour drinking, so, not much trouble from that quarter – and certainly no die-hard mavericks risking prosecution in order to preserve their establishments in the acrid mists of time.

The smoking ban was a quintessential Blairite policy – perhaps the signature legislation of an entire decade of government. It was a measure taken after the fact of its acceptance that nonetheless allowed the politicians involved to style themselves as the vanguard of a new health consciousness. It involved minor government spending for maximum effect, and it fitted perfectly into a hard utilitarian calculus, that sees the promotion of life – even if it’s a life endlessly prolonged in miserable sub-standard state “care homes” – as the pre-eminent moral good.

Opinions differ enormously as to whether the ban has actually achieved a decrease in English smoking. The statistics will be hard to crunch, given the porousness of our borders to cigarettes and rolling-tobacco-seeking asylum. Some opine that the ban has actually increased smoking, now that the hard-core element stop at home, chaining away, but I have my doubts. One thing is for sure: it’ll take a long time for the policy to filter through to any unequivocally positive health benefits, while the possibility remains – remote but real – that the ban may make smoking still more attractive to yoof seeking optimal transgression. Remember: nicotine is a drug.

For myself, while I never opposed the ban, I have to say that I find it a bit more of a drag than I thought I would. Perversely, although I’m a frantic gourmand when it comes to most means of intoxication, I always rather fancied myself as a tobacco gourmet. Not for me the bum-sucked Silk Cut, oh no. I always favoured the Hoyo de Monterey Epicure No 2, preferably ignited in the cosy confines of St John, my favourite London restaurant. Now that this gestalt of good food + good talk + great cigar has been blown away, I feel quite deprived. Not for me the whey-faced company who cluster beneath drenched awnings, nor the ambulatory injection of the required dosage. I have taken to nicotine substitutes in order to bridge the gulf of need that has opened up outside my own pipe- and humidor-lined study and I suspect that, fings not being wot they used to, I may soon abandon the fags altogether.

Still, what goes around comes around, and for all those triumphalist former health secretaries out there, basking in their success, it’s worth biting down on this: public smoking was banned in 17 US states in the 1870s, but when the peoples’ habits changed again, so did the legislation.

28.12.07

The past few weeks, both here and in the US, I’ve been trolling around promoting the collection of these pieces entitled, with rare percipience, PsychoGeography. Author events have a fairly rigid format, and it’s one that I’ve learnt not to monkey with over the years. It’s all very well coming on singing and dancing in a heliotrope jumpsuit, but your average attendees simply can’t absorb such a spectacle: they are like unto the Hungarian peasants, who, upon being shown an early cine film of a train, bolted from their seats lest the iron horse trample them to death.

A key component of the author event is the Q&A session. I always make it clear that anyone can ask me anything whatsoever, whether this be my views on literary matters, or simply a prurient enquiry into my personal life, such as you wouldn’t hazard with your closest friend. Needless to say, what often gets thrown at me is: “How did you and Ralph Steadman begin working together?” I then lie, saying that we met in a brothel in Patpong, where Ralph was squeezing ping-pong balls out of his vagina in order to pay for his drinks. This normally shuts them up, although the other evening in Bath a very proper lady, who looked as if she’d stepped from the pages of Northanger Abbey, did contest the notion that Ralph had ever visited Thailand.

In fact we were teamed by Ian Hargreaves, then editor of the New Statesman, during the 1997 General Election. Ralph had become fed up by the noxious vanity of politicians which meant no matter how savagely he caricatured their venal features, they still asked to buy his drawings. In retaliation, he resolved never to draw a politician’s face again, but only their legs. I was drafted in to do some copy to go with the legs. Ralph’s stratagem worked, and to my knowledge no one bought their leg picture. Ha!

All this is by way of introducing Ralph’s caricature of Hilary Benn in conversation with a pig at the recent UN conference on climate change held in Bali. Benn, perhaps one of our most conscientious environment secretaries to date, declined the £330 per night hotel suite laid on for him in favour of staying in a pig sty, and while the other delegates went on surfing trips, he built an eco-friendly geodesic dome out of pig shit and straw. Of course, such behaviour was soon seized upon by the trendy publicity-seekers who flock in the wake of these global beanos. Apparently Leonardo DiCaprio moved out of his suite and into a mouse’s nest, while Al Gore had to content himself with a lobster pot.

Pessimists, who believe that there’s little that can be done to reduce the human impact on global warming, predictably point to events like the Bali summit as confirming their bleak vision. How can it be, they ask, that flying 15,000 delegates, media types and soi-disant “green campaigners” around the world, in the process dumping a further 100,000 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, will really help to improve things? After all, this is equal to the emissions of the entire country of Chad for a single year!

This very point was made by a delegate to the summit, and luckily Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, was on hand to offer a timely solution: the carbon emissions of the UN conference could, he said, be completely offset by eliminating Chad altogether from the map of Africa. This proposal received near-unanimous assent from the Conference, the only dissent coming from the Chad delegation, which was unceremoniously hustled out of the venue and put to work by the Indonesian Government planting trees in West Timor.

The excision of Chad was achieved by the US corporation Halliburton, which deployed a scalpel with a blade 500km long, that sliced along the borders of Niger, Libya, the Sudan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon and Nigeria, leaving a neat wound. Besides the carbon offset, an unexpected – but beneficial – effect of getting rid of Chad has been a shake-down in regional political alignments, with stunned power elites and corrupt rebel armies joining together in the common cause: swapping their Mercedes for Toyota Priuses.

I think from the above you can see where Ralph and I stand on this issue: shoulder-to-shoulder and leg-to-leg, as usual. The benefits of pursuing a close collaboration with a fellow artist over many years is that you begin to anticipate one another’s thinking with almost uncanny precision. Sometimes I write a few words and Ralph consents to graphically embellish them. On other occasions – such as this – Ralph sends me a picture that is like a photograph of my very unconscious.

15.12.07

Lewes, East Sussex, where this column began all those horned moons ago. As I walk from the station under another horned moon I spy, standing outside a cosy-looking pub, the cuddly dolmen of Matthew De Abaitua. Thirteen years ago, Matthew – who is now a talented novelist in his own right – spent a six-month sojourn as my live-in amanuensis and secretary. It was a thankless task: so far as I can remember I was completely spark-a-loco. We were living in a tiny cottage in Suffolk, and I was given to harvesting opium from the poppies that grew wild in the field margins, then driving my Citreon deux-chevaux across the same fields, solely by the light of a horned moon, Matthew placidly crammed into the passenger seat.

Bizarrely, he retains affectionate memories of his secretaryship, saying that I taught him how to prepare lobster, and also impressed upon him the importance of convincing foreign journalists – who had come to interview me in my rural fastness – that we were an elderly lesbian couple, akin to the Ladies of Llangollen. But this lies in the past, nowadays Matthew and his burgeoning family are ensconced in Lewes, where come Guy Fawkes Day, the incomer crystal-danglers and the native hobbits make common cause: promulgating the anti-Popery of the local “firework societies”, which roll burning barrels of pitch down the tortuous medieval streets.

A couple of hours later, Ralph Steadman, who has materialised looking like Great Uncle Bulgaria with an attitude problem, is sitting on a stage in the local arts centre, taking an enthusiastic audience on a strange journey through the labyrinth of his creative unconscious. Juxtaposing his own projected images, with a staccato commentary, in the manner of Chris Marker’s La Jetee, Ralph imagines a conversation between Marcel Duchamp and Luis Bunuel, in which the venerable – and now, quite dead – Surrealists animadvert on the relationship between chance encounters, narrative and destiny.

Far be it from me to extol the virtues of my collaborator, but he’s definitely hit on something here – and quite brilliantly: the relationship between psyche and place can only, it occurs to me, be understood through such abrupt transitions. The memory is not Bayreuth – or even a multiplex – but a converted provincial church hall equipped with a PowerPoint projector, operated by a young man called Simon.

Nineteen hours later, I’m sitting in the front row of a lecture theatre at the Sorbonne in Paris, listening to Didier Gerard, a handsome young professor of contemporary English literature at the University of Perpignan, take a somewhat less enthusiastic – but for all that, I hope, engaged – audience on a strange journey through the labyrinth of his creative unconscious. Or is it mine? To begin with the only PowerPoint projection is this gnomic slogan: “Radical No Saying, Paradoxes and Contradictions of the WILL / SELF “, but Professor Gerard then supplies several disconcerting canvases by the German painter Neo Rauch that he feels evoke the same imaginative hinterland as my fiction.

Here we are, buried in the venerable foie-gras-coloured masonry of the Sorbonne a few score metres in one direction from Shakespeare & Company, publishers of Ulysses in the other, a few hundred from the Ile de la Cite, where the Situationists who coined the term “psychogeography” slept off their drunken derives. On our way in, Francois Gallix, the Sorbonne professor who has invited me to address this conference on contemporary inglit, pointed out the chapel, a stable for revolutionaries’ horses during the Terror, and where an annual mass is held for Cardinal Richelieu.

It was also in this courtyard, during Les Evenements of 1968, that the students camped for weeks, attempting to lie down on the Society of the Spectacle until it gave up the ghost. Francois, who was a young academic at the time, and who joined in the demands for direct, participatory democracy, recalls those days with a certain wry regret: “And now, with these recent disturbances we have over Sarkozy’s new education bill, well, yesterday the University was closed, the road was full of the police, and the students, they were split into two groups – one of which was fighting on the police side!”

Since my last visit to Paris, a mere six months ago, the Mairie has launched a bike-hire scheme. I never really believe these schemes work, but as I leave the Sorbonne in the winter lamplight there are scores of people – Parisians and tourists – toodling up and down the Boulevard St Germain on their eco-Noddy-bikes. At L’Odeon there’s a customised rank for the things right beside the statue of Danton, which, in turn, is right in front of a multiplex called the UGC Danton.

And there you have it, as we contemplate the arrival of 2008, and another year of speculative venturing, what is it that we can offer you save more of the same? To whit: a chance meeting between a dead fish log and a caricature on a picnic table.

05.01.08

At the Seneca Hotel, on Chestnut Street, Chicago, things are not going well. I’m without stoicism: my room is a chilly suite with glass-topped tables and a tomb-like kitchenette, wherein the elements rise up from the stove in sinister curls. When I turn on the electricity, they reek of burnt hair. If I don’t get out of the Seneca and walk, I’m going to do something gratuitously inhumane — which would be doubly bad, given that I’m here to attend the Chicago Humanities Festival.

I’m not getting on with the desk staff either — they’re brusque to the point of being rude. They couldn’t give a shit about my alarm calls or messages, and when I wither at them for helming a great concrete ship like this, with no internet access to be had — they wither right back. Nevertheless, when I ask how far it is to the nearest Wal-Mart, I do manage to spark some interest. “Whydjew wanna know that?” says one, and when I reply that I’m minded to buy some socks, she observes that, “There’s a Walgreens on the next corner.” I concede this — but it’s Wal-Mart I want, and I’m desirous of walking there. “Walking? That’s gonna take you, like, a million years.”

Quite possibly, I concede, then quote the hotel’s namesake: “If virtue precedes us every step will be safe.” Clearly, my interlocutor doesn’t know her Seneca, for she looks bemused. Then she consults MapQuest on her computer and prints me out a sheet: “The nearest is at forty-six hundred up on West North, it’s 5.7 miles away…”

“But that’s driving, right?”

“I guess.”

I estimate an eight-mile walk — at any rate, it takes me two-and-a-half hours at a good clip. It’s a sunny Sunday brunchtime and the downtown streets are thronged with big people in leather and silk pointing at big buildings in glass and steel. Then, as I plod out over Goose Island and under the Kennedy Expressway, everything begins to stretch out — including the homeless men who are sleeping beneath its squat piers.

Chicago is the grid city ne plus ultra: the principal avenues and cross streets are at mile intervals, with eight blocks to the mile. The numbering — both of streets and properties — is savagely ordinal, radiating from a fixed point. A Chicagoan will give you directions simply in hundreds, as above.

I meditate on this as I troll through the fringes of trendy Ukrainian Village, then the dinky clapboard streets of West Town. I’m walking to Wal-Mart to buy some socks, a) because I need them, and b) because in some occult way I believe this will bring me face-to-face with the primal profit drive that powers American society. If Chicago, with its triumphal skyscrapers, were to be upended, it would form a towering block graph on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan, and so fuse reality and representation.

Wal-Mart, the biggest company on earth, with its two million employees, and its annual turnover of $315 billion. When Dubya cut tax in 2004, the family of the founder, Sam Walton, made $9,500 an hour by this break alone. Walton catapulted this global empire of tat into the air, using the tedious gusset of a pair of two-barred tricot panties with an elasticated waist, after observing that if he bought said pants at $2 per dozen, and only marked-up a little, he could still make more profit on increased turnover.

Through Humboldt Park, empty save for cops and geese, then past the HQ of Illinois National Guard — a Babylonian burial chamber, complete with sentinel griffins — and on along North Avenue, for block after block, mile after mile. I am a tiny human pen describing a flat line past moribund storefronts, and empty lots, their fences strung with razor-wire. Is it fanciful to think that Wal-Mart has sucked the commercial life out of Austin and Gatewood, where — wouldn’t you know — the population is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic? Probably not: one economist, after remorseless number-crunching, reached the conclusion that over a 10-year period, the net impact of the business was to help keep just 20,000 poor US families afloat.

And then there it is, big, certainly — but not humongous. More like any old Asda that’s been bingeing on welfare cheques. Inside it’s a barn full of stuff for sale — nothing obviously malevolent. The coffee concession is called Uncle Remus’s, and there’s an offer on key lime pie. I buy my socks. I pay. I leave.

At the bus stop I fall into conversation with a guy who bums a cigarette. He’s on his way to work flipping burgers at a Wendy’s way over on the other side of town. “It’s aggravating work,” he explains between puffs. Aggravating and poorly paid — like Wal-Mart. Nevertheless, despite the fact he’s broke until payday, and he only has one tooth in his mouth, he could teach Seneca a thing or two about stoicism.

01.12.07

“When I see a guy lighting a goddamn cigarette as I come round the corner, I see a guy who ain’t taking the bus into town!” exclaims the bus driver, a competent black woman, who even as I feed my four one-dollar bills into the machine, is ramming the big, whooshing box up the ramp on to Route 101, heading north for San Francisco. “City of Industry” is the slogan picked out in big, white letters on the hillside ahead — presumably it’s some sort of riposte to “HOLLYWOOD”, but I doubt the Los Angelenos can read it at this distance.

It’s pointless to explain to the bus driver that this is a guy who’s down to three cigarettes a day, after a lifetime spent flying around inside a blue-brown cloud. In previous columns, I’ve animadverted on the way the space-time continuum is graduated by smoking, but now I’m down to three the shifts are dizzying: I was last embodied in dank Toronto, then I winked out of existence for a few hours, before being beamed down a white paper tube into smouldering California.

I’m absurdly happy. I may not be undertaking my favourite form of airport transit — walking — but I have eschewed the cab, and that has to be a good thing. Cabs suck: they’re the real culprits when it comes to urban disorientation. You aren’t merely hiring a car and driver — you’re hiring the cabby’s local geographical nous. No matter how hard you try to concentrate on where he’s taking you, you still end up subsiding into foggy supposition: this is somewhere you don’t know, and he’s going the long way round this agglomeration of ignorance.

But take the bus, and the mere act of finding the stop, looking at the route map, and then negotiating your way from the city centre stop to your hotel, will begin to make things legible. Dusk is falling as I turn the corner into Market Street, and I’m still happy to be reading the city, so happy that I swerve into a bookstore and buy a copy of Great Expectations, because I’m certain I have them.

The following morning the weather is set fair, and I resolve to walk to Sausalito. It’ll be a modest enough 12-miler from downtown San Francisco, dog-legging over the Golden Gate Bridge. Of course, I don’t have a topographic map, and although Nob Hill is in my face, I can’t find a way round it. I slave up the famously vertiginous streets, listening to the chains of the funiculars rattling beneath my feet. By the time I reach the North Point I feel like Herbie in The Love Bug. My bonnet is flapping, my oil is leaking.

It’s Sunday and the esplanade is thronged with walkers, joggers, bikers, crackpot preachers, and those ubiquitous denizens of American cities — in many ways their most typical inhabitants — the homeless, who have been tossed by the rampaging bull of commercialism, and compelled to wander the streets pushing shopping carts piled high with their fucked-up chattels. I bet they know where they are, though.

Up on the bridge there are still more walkers. Indeed, it occurs to me that this is more ambulatory activity than I’ve ever seen anywhere in the States before — except Manhattan. Perhaps this is what Americans need to galvanise them: something really big — but manmade — to walk over. Halfway across there are emergency phones advertising: “Crisis Counseling” (sic) “There is Hope. Make the Call. The Consequences of Jumping from this Bridge are Fatal and Tragic”.

The “tragic” is a nice touch, no? It places even the most commonplace suicide on a set of monumental proportions, enacting a Gotterdammerung of awesome scale, leaping from the very strings of this monumental lyre, as Aeolus himself strums them. But then again, presumably that’s why the most commonplace suicides are drawn to the Golden Gate, and the “tragic”, far from dissuading them, is likely to be the final confirmation of the rightness of their actiooooooooon!

Grim thoughts dog me as I double back under the end of the bridge, then trudge through the precincts of a coastguard station and on into Sausalito, where the houses are more shingled that anything has a right to be — unless it actually has shingles. There are these wooden excrescences, then there are the gift shops selling china knick-knacks and T-shirts, and “art” galleries shoving hideous daubs in my face.

I slurp down a dozen indifferent oysters at Spinnaker’s on the quayside. Dusk is falling across the bay. I feel moderately satisfied: at least I know where I am, even if the woman at the next table is having a nervous breakdown, sobbing noisily into her clam chowder. On the ferry back to San Francisco, the day-trippers light up the night sky with their camera flashes as we cruise past Alcatraz, imprisoning the empty penitentiary in their steely little boxes. Forever.

24.11.07

Ralph claims that this picture (right, in the Independent newspaper) faithfully reproduces a life-threatening encounter that he had with a grizzly bear during his most recent sojourn in Canada. According to Ralph, he drove the devilish bear off with his ink pot. It’s all lies, of course. I know because I’ve just been in Canada and I heard the whole story from several eye-witnesses who saw Ralph and the Grizzly together.

So, it’s not that Ralph was entirely deluded on the contrary it was inevitable that he would meet up with a grizzly sooner or later, as with global warming disrupting the environment of the far north, the ranges of the former (Artificer cantankerous) and the latter (Ursus arctos horribilis) increasingly overlap. We’ve all read tales of troublesome grizzlies venturing into North American cities, rifling trashcans for food and attempting swift – but brutal – congress with SUVs, just as we’ve all also read accounts of English satirists entering North American cities and pestering their inhabitants with visceral and disturbing graphic works. Most of us probably considered what might happen when the two species met up – although no one anticipated that they would fall in love.

I don’t know why Ralph is so coy about his inter-specific love affair with Griselda (for such, I have ascertained, is the name of “his” bear), because the previous year, during his time at the Harbourfront Festival in Toronto, the two of them were inseparable. Jim, the driver for the Festival (he says “Hello”, Ralph, by the way), picked them up together at the airport and drove them into town.

For the next three days, except when Ralph was required onstage at the Festival, he and Griselda were shut up together in Room 2146. Neither bear nor artist were seen to mingle with the other authors who gathered in the hospitality suite on the penthouse floor – leading them to suspect that Ralph was being huffy and stand-offish.

All except Kazuo Ishiguro who saw Ralph and Griselda swimming together in the hotel pool. “To be honest,” he told me recently, “I was a little bit fried. I’d pulled an all-nighter with Margaret Atwood. We got pissed and she used this computerised ‘long pen’ device that she’s invented to sign books at remote locations, to, ah, y’know, pinch people’s bottoms in European bookshops and otherwise generally molest them. It was childish behaviour, and I’m not proud of myself. Anyway, I thought I’d sober up with a sauna at around 6am, and went down to the spa on the fifth floor. There were these two enormous bear-like figures frolicking together in the pool …

“They seemed very affectionate. Steadman was sort of lifting the bear out of the water and tossing it about – or, as they say in Canada, ‘aboot’ – and from time to time he’d twang the strap of its bikini top. I was amazed, because I’d been for a swim in the pool myself, and the chlorine was so strong I’d spent the next four hours half-blinded, yet neither Steadman nor the bear seemed in the least discomfitted.”

“Discomfitted”, eh? I think the use of that very term alone confirms this indisputably as the authentic testimony of the Booker-prize winning author. But if any further verification were needed, we have the copies of Ralph’s room-service bills at the Westin Harbour. In three days, Room 2146 ordered up 27 club sandwiches, 18 cheeseburgers, 27 porterhouse steaks, 17 full breakfasts – and even requested the concierge that he simply “bring the goddamn wheelie-bin up from the kitchen”.

It’s fair to say that Canada is no longer the society it once was. Gone are the days when the entire culture was crimped by a dour – if polite – Presbyterianism, and sexual activity of any kind whatsoever was frowned upon. Nowadays, the Conservative Premier, Stephen Harper, is often seen at state banquets completely naked save for a strategically placed maple leaf and with a fetching beaver on his arm. Canadians explain their re-evaluation of all values with reference to changing climate – it never freezes anymore – and the high rate of immigration: Calgary is now the biggest Brazilian city in the world. In the US, those mad Manicheans would’ve put a stop to Ralph’s goings on, but such was the atmosphere of tolerance in Toronto, that he returned in September of this year, hoping to rekindle his passion. Only to discover that Griselda had run away with a Major League Hockey player, whose build was more to her taste. Hence Ralph’s defamatory drawing, and wish-fulfilment fantasy – both the work of a demented and rejected suitor.

10.11.07