My daily go-round has a menacing stereotypy: I walk the dog with such regularity it’s hard to know which of us is on the lead. I’d like to be able to say that the business of publicising a new book – with readings, interviews and so on – is something of a departure, but it ain’t so. I’ve been trundling to Bristol, Bath, Brighton and Birmingham year in year out for almost two decades now, so that these journeys have the quality of an annual progress by some cut-rate monarch viewing his papery pop-up dominions.

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.

En route for the tiny and remote Hebridean island of St Kilda I found myself grappling with a tiny and remote problem. I have told myself time and time again that there are no technical solutions for writers, only imaginative ones – but that doesn’t stop me from falling prey to these delusions: this computer/typewriter/research will catapult the work in hand to new levels.

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.

Apologies if you were directed here by a Google search, only to discover that you’re reading about a walk through the London sewers. But then, should I feel sorry? The Black Controller recently pointed out to me that Google canalises knowledge: forcing the surfer into a narrow bore of information, which is constituted by its assumptions about what you want to know, based on the frequency with which they’ve been hit before. Put simply, the more you surf, the more of the same old shit you skid across. No wonder the virtual world seems so pissy-samey.

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.

To the Barbican for our annual works outing to see the Michael Clark Company‘s latest offering. True, I am not a great connoisseur of modern dance, but I still have an instinctive feeling that Clark is a great choreographer (instinct, and Mrs S to apprise me). Woody Allen once wrote a savage spoof of avant garde ballet, attributing the most pretentious and ridiculous sentiments to these gyrations and curvets, but I sense nothing of that coming from Clark’s work, which seems all at once to fold the narrative into the symbolic, while wryly skipping around both with sheer kinetics. It helps, of course, that his troupe dances to the Velvet Underground.

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.

Don’t shit where you eat is as good a maxim as any other – but I just can’t keep it in. A few weeks ago the genial young man opposite got a new jam jar. It’s metallic green in colour – but then aren’t they all, and just as obviously has profile tyres and an allusion to a spoiler, rather than the spoiler itself. It also has a disconcerting habit of soliloquizing: “System armed!” it croaks when he locks it, employing tones suitable to a grizzled CIA interrogator applying electrodes to a recalcitrant Islamist. “Stand back, system armed!” it croaks when a pedestrian walks by – presumably because they’ve triggered some kind of sensor.

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.

I am sorry, oh so sorry, that I ever suggested Baroness Thatcher should’ve been torn apart by urban foxes back in the early 1980s, before she could lay waste to generations of the British working class. I hope this won’t disqualify me from becoming the leader of the Labour Party – a post which I have absolutely no desire to occupy, and therefore probably should.

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?

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.

In Wiltshire for the weekend, the M4 is retrospectively rolled up and stashed away in a carpet warehouse of dead roads. I lie on eiderdown, bluebottles buzzing from meadow through drapes, then round my sleepy head. My sons organise painfully exact tableaux of the D-Day evacuations and I urge them to shoot at the advancing 002. scale Wermacht with air pistols. The man with the neat white moustache who’s obsessed by fishing (Catherine Martell’s husband in Lynch’s Twin Peaks?), stands talking with two of the same – and me – over glasses of elderflower presse. This could perhaps go on forever…

But no, there is late morning, and coffee and toast, and the newspaper with its own rumpled dreamscape. The Prime Minister has been in Cumbria, talking about how a community can get over this sort of thing… Strange, as the Anglican Church withers away, so the executive – who after all appoints the Primate in the first place – takes on the cod-spiritual duties of the established church. No wonder no one can get it right.

There is talk of a new Tory MP, famously dashing, to whom posh totty is attracted like flies to… yet he does nothing. Sometimes… Clovis drawls… I think the asexual hide behind the widespread assumption that they must be gay.

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.

The symptoms are precise: a patch of prismatic distortion grows in the left-hand corner of my visual field, then expands in semicircular bands until it covers the whole field of both eyes (I also have binocular vision due to a strabismus, and so am insistently aware of the duality of my visual field, perhaps this explains my liking for fictions that take place in parallel worlds?), in a pattern that can best be likened to a kaleidoscope. It’s pretty, and would be quite like the effects of a hallucinogen, were it not that instead of euphoria there’s only a dull thrum of a headache. It doesn’t disable me, I don’t have to lie down, it fades fairly rapidly – usually within 20 minutes; yesterday’s all-dayer was an exception – and it appears brought on either by caffeine/physical exertion, or – and most bizarre this – hill walking over 3,000 feet.

Nevertheless, when these migraines first appeared a few years ago, I foolishly embarked on the usual battery of tests courtesy of our great socialised medicine, and ended up seeing an ophthalmology consultant at St Thomas’s in London. They did the test where they squirt a dilator into your eye and then scan the retina (my GP’s assumption was that I had a tear). While the nurse was doing this, the consultant – who appeared to be playing up to some idea of himself – scanned the drawings I’d made in my notebook of what I could see during the attacks. “Didn’t you look at these!” he expostulated. “Haven’t you examined this man’s very helpful drawings!” he berated her: “This man has migraine! This is a classic migraine! We’re wasting his time – and ours!” When he calmed, I asked him who, if not he, I should consult about the kaleidoscopes intermittently rammed in my eyes. “Oh, I don’t know,” he spluttered, “a neurologist, I suppose – if you can be bothered. After all … ” I had told him about the lack of headaches and the 3,000-foot onset point “it’s not like you have a bad case!”

All in all a most gratifying waste of public resources.

***

Newsnight calls asking me to go on this evening to discuss the Cumbrian shootings: ‘We’re looking for someone to speculate on what it is about these remote, rural communities, largely white – ’

“Look,” I interrupt, “I’m going to stop you right there; much as I’d like to come on the programme I know next to nothing about remote, rural, largely white communities – I’m very much your urban, multi-coloured kind of a guy … ”

But am I? After all, plenty of people have been shot dead in the immediate purlieus of my south London home over the past few years, and I know just as little about the socio-cultural nexus of their motivations (if such a thing could be said to exist) as I do about those of this killer. Still, I’m confident someone will be persuaded to shoot their mouth off on Newsnight in my stead – if there’s anyone more trigger-happy than a gun nut, it’s a member of the London commentariat.