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.

Who will listen to this stuff? I’ve never been huge on talking books myself, and back in the day the demographic – older, plusher, Mondeo-folk – seemed to be beyond the horizon of my work … but now? Well, now I am those folk – oh, yes, oh yes indeed. And to confirm this I run into some guy in the street who recalls meeting me first with Barney X (notorious junky) in Oxford in 1980, then in Freddy B’s flat in 1998 (another of the same, and his flat is the setting for Birdy Num Num), and that latterly he is in touch with James Z (notorious junky, the model for Prometheus in the story of the same name). In truth, I can’t remember who this guy is – but given his CV is this surprising? I told him about the book, omitting to mention the strange coincidence: his knowing two of the mise-en-scenes there depicted. I don’t know if he’ll read it – he’s in a half-way house for recovering addicts – but by the time he’s back on his feet, the talking book should be available.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?’

‘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

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.

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?

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?

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 wrote this short gobbet for my regular London Evening Standard column on December 27. My editor there spiked it, I can only assume out of some knee-jerky patriotism that was banging around her brain. Nothing commands English attitudes more than the great, dying, effete behemoth that was Edwardian British Imperialism. I forgot about my gobbet for a couple of weeks, until the news that some new gang of idiots were traipsing off across Antarctica, valiantly “man-hauling” their equipment. So, in a spirit of futility, I’d like to share it with you:

“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.”

Happy New Year. What to say about my inability to blog? My blogstipation — if you will. Here, in London, the pissed old farts who run the print media have, belatedly and half-assedly, realised the significance of this new literary form. It’s true, guys, we’re all going down, or rather, the prints are going to fold. However, Marshall McLuhan was wrong, the medium is not the message; or rather, the idea that user-generated content is going to supplant the need for a caste of professional scribes is nonsense. Something like the newspaper will endure — but on the web. In the meantime, hacks on the London Guardian are required to enter the blogosphere, and, since their email addresses are also at the bottom of their print columns, engage in lengthy discussions with the iPod-heads. Those at the Telegraph even have to do their stuff as podcasts. Thank Nike the editors I work for haven’t sicked on to this. Yet.