August and Everything After: Life’s Rich Pageant and Summer’s End

Forty years ago, on July 28th 1986, REM released their fourth album, Life Rich Pageant. I was seventeen, about to turn eighteen and still living between my mother’s house and my father’s house in a Hertfordshire small town. This life-defining album - teeming with angular melodies and startling, half-comprehensible lyrics marinated in the worldly-wise timbre of Michael Stipe’s voice - would infuse all the days of August that would follow, and those of September too, long into the autumn when many things would change.

August really is a strange, unsettling, transitional month, and always the more so for me as my birthday falls on the 25th (as it did for Martin Amis, Sean Connery and still does for Elvis Costello). By the end of every August, I’m always a year older, and the summer is gone. A memory. A done deal. The first of September always feels like the death of promise. In that particular year, I’d perhaps foolishly followed Morrissey’s advice on The Queen Is Dead - another landmark album released a month before REM’s - and spent every dreaded sunny day indoors. There was a strong sense of things being over when that September arrived. Of unfulfilled promise, or frittered time. ‘August, die she must,’ as Paul Simon sang on ‘April, Come She Will’, and she always does, often ignominiously. After eight months, the year starts to sag in the knees, its energy gone; the once lush leaves of the plane trees are coated with dust, and a breath of September enters the air. The autumn winds blow chilly and cold. There are famous songs about September, of course, but August, perhaps, deserves a few more.

For me, the August of 1986 was when adolescence gave way to adulthood, a process which was as much forced as self-imposed. By the end of the month, I’d extricated myself from the bind of moving between the houses of two often-absent parents and found myself a bedsit near the station. Most of my contemporaries had flown their coops for various provincial universities, leaving me alone except for my twin brother, with whom I’d resolved to form a band that would get us out of town. It was an intense time, soundtracked by those strange and beguiling songs on Life’s Rich Pageant, which still sound, to use to the cliché, as fresh as the day they were recorded. It’s a record that’s impossible to ignore, or turn off, from the moment the stylus hits the vinyl. The opening triumvirate of tunes has never been equalled by the band. Starting with ‘Begin the Begin’, with its tortured groans of feedback, followed by the feral, quicksilver ‘These Days’, the final song is the fiercely beautiful ‘Fall on Me’, a song about acid rain, then pressingly relevant following the Chernobyl disaster in April of that year. Always a political band (one thinks of the observation, ‘Jefferson, I think we’re lost’ from Reckoning’s ‘Don’t Go Back to Rockville’) they would become blatantly more so when they arrived at their stadium years. Though their political engagement was never so subtle or as hopeful as on Life’s Rich Pageant. One thinks of the line, ‘Let’s put our heads together/ start a new country up,’ from ‘Cuyahoga’, a song about the Cuyahoga river in Ohio which set alight, so polluted had it become with industrial chemicals. The sentiment is even more relevant today in Trump’s America. Away from the realpolitik, was there a more limpid ballad than ‘The Flowers of Guatemala’? Or a more joyous anthem to life than ‘I Believe’, in which Stipe laments his boyhood years when he was ‘young and full of grace’. Despite this fall from innocence, he still defiantly believes, though not, we imagine, in a religious sense. This faith in life, reaffirmed time and again throughout the album, is what makes it so enduring.

Towards the end of side two, after the abandoned power pop of ‘Just a Touch’, after the gritty sea shanty ‘Swan Swan H,’ (which is possibly ‘about’ heroin, though Stipe’s lyrics were always so associative as to make such literal claims redundant), there’s a final song, a cover of the Clique’s ‘Superman’; a tune my brother and I immediately learnt with its simple, soaring harmonies and earthy pedal between E and A major. We played it at every rehearsal with our nascent band, the Stormboys, who were by then practising three times a week. The venue for this was a blues-party basement rehearsal studio strewn with empty Red Stripe cans, run by the mysterious Mrs Loo, a woman who inhabited the house’s attic. Mrs Loo lurked in this room like a spider, and it was to her web we would venture trepidatiously, up the rickety stairs with a ten-pound note cocked and ready to pay for our session.

Many years before that transitional summer, I’d discovered one of my mother’s Penguin paperbacks by her bed, an Edna O’ Brien novel entitled A Scandalous Woman. The cover was shocking. I was nine years old, and unprepared for a full-bleed photograph of an adult woman standing naked in the window of a cottage, defiantly waiting (we are perhaps meant to believe) for her secret lover. I couldn’t conceive that my mother would want to read such a book, or why she would want to leave it so brazenly on her bedside table. The reason was perhaps to impress our future stepfather, who had once himself been our mother’s secret lover, but who had since installed his size-twelve shoes under the kitchen table and was making our lives hell on a daily basis. The cover spoke of adult intimacies, secrets and betrayals, all the things we heard whispered around the dinner table after we’d been told to get up to bed and clean our teeth or there’d be ‘hell to pay’. There was also another racy-sounding O’ Brien novel beside my mother’s bed: August Is a Wicked Month. The title chosen by O’ Brien wasn’t incidental. August is a time for wantonness, for over-ripe passions, for things gone to seed.

August is also, as far as the gutter press is concerned, ‘silly season’. With parliament in recess, and the carousel of Westminster politics over for a long break, there’s nothing to report on except to magnify absurd, prurient stories. Yet, while growing up, it always struck me that August was the time of significant disasters. Something terrible always happened. The assassination of Mountbatten on his fishing skiff by the IRA in 1979. The invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein in 1990. Then, in the last dusty days of August 1997, the death of Princess Diana after months of hounding by the paparazzi. A cruel and sad, if inevitable, demise. At the time, it wasn’t an REM song that soundtracked this event, but the Manic’s twisted and desperate ‘Die in the Summertime’ from The Holy Bible, released three years before. Most recently, there was the tragic suicide of the Cambridge academic, Jason Arday, after a racist witch hunt in the right-wing press; another needless tragedy, one that can only grow in resonance over the years to come.

For the French, August is sacrosanct. Paris empties every year, and the serious business of les vacances begins. No work is to be attempted until la rentrée in September. In Éric Rohmer’s film, Le rayon vert, Delphine, played with understated grace and torment by Marie Rivière, spends the whole month trying and failing to go on holiday with someone after a break-up. It seems everyone has already made plans, and she goes on one abortive solo trip after another. Eventually, she finds redemption in the south of France on meeting a stranger in a railway station after fleeing a disastrous double date. With this promising new man, she witnesses the legendary green ray that can be glimpsed when the sun meets the ocean at dusk. Paul King, the director of the Paddington films, once told me Le rayon vert was the best love story ever filmed. I can’t disagree. It’s also full of the ennui of August, the restless feeling that life is going on elsewhere, or that youth is about to end once and for all unless one grasps the main chance before the window of opportunity closes once and for all.

There are a number weak or terrible albums that happen to have great titles. Knocked out Loaded by Dylan, for instance, or Strangeways Here We Come by the Smiths. One such title is August and Everything After by the Counting Crows, a band I came to despise more than any other in the 90s with perhaps the exception of Right Said Fred. A run-of-the-mill alt-Americana, grunge outfit trading in the wake of Nirvana’s success, Counting Crows nevertheless entranced me with the title of their 1993 breakthrough album. It seemed unfair that they should’ve come up with this poetic title all on their own. I had assumed it was a line from Dylan Thomas, or even Shakespeare, until learning it had originated from the Crows’ August-born songwriter and frontman, Adam Duritz, who had begun and abandoned a song with that title. It was essentially a song about everything that had occurred after the August of his birth - in other words, his whole life. No wonder he threw it away.

Life’s Rich Pageant is an album with a great title that also happens to be genuinely great. Without meaning to, the title encompasses some of the transitional qualities of August. Life - and summer - is passing fast, for better or for worse. There’s nothing one can do but view it stoically, as all part of life’s rich pageant. Indeed, some of the album’s deeper cuts, reveal riches on each new listen. The way Stipe garrulously phrases beautiful young lady on ‘Hyena’ for instance, in a way that’s wholly un-creepy or lascivious. Though Stipe never officially came out as gay, only a gay man could get away with singing such a line. And on side two’s ‘What If We Throw It Away’ there’s a couplet that increases in meaning with every passing year as I get older: ‘Here’s the trailer, Tom/ A year has come and gone’. Yes, it seems to insist, when I listen to the album one final time every October; a ritual before I put it away for another year. Remember the time. It’s later than you think. Begin the begin.

We Are Not Alone: UFOs, Parents and Other Mysteries

It took a while for me to realise that every film my father took my brother and I to see in the 1970s was something he also wanted to see himself. No Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo or The Muppet Movie for him. The big blockbuster of 1978 was Spielberg’s spectacular Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and so, one evening during our third and final visit to Paris, we made the car journey from his flat in Sceaux to a Right Bank cinema where we sat spellbound for two extraordinary hours watching it. We really had no idea what to expect. Luckily, Close Encounters was in the VO, which our trusty Pariscope guide told us meant the version originale, so we wouldn’t have to endure it dubbed into French.

The film opens like a horror movie, with one unexplained incident following another. We start off in a desert sandstorm, coming across the ghostly planes from Flight 19, intact since their disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle in 1945. A benign Frenchman (who our father later told us was the great French director François Truffaut) talks to a toothless old man who tells him the previous night the sun came out and sang to him. Then we’re in a big house on the Plains, its windows open to the summer night, with a young boy watching his toys leap into frenzied life while the contents of a big American refrigerator spills onto the floor. Soon he’s running outside under a huge starscape pursued by his frantic single-mother in denim shorts. Then we’re in a more familiar domestic kitchen with a family man on the verge of breakdown as his kids run riot at bedtime. A powercut outs the whole neighbourhood so he sets off in his pick-up truck to assist. But when he’s held at a level crossing, intense lights from the sky pin his truck to the road. Everything in his driver’s cab goes berserk. The CB radio. The dashboard gauges. The road maps and junk-food cartons. The lights are so bright half his face is sunburnt. Soon he’s tearing round a bend on a mountain road, where he almost runs over the little boy from earlier. There he joins a group of expectant ordinary folk, including the boy’s mother, to witness their first beguiling UFOs under a vast indigo sky.

It was an incredible opening twenty minutes, and we watched open-mouthed as the film unspooled. We were gripped by the spectacle of the family man – Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfus, who we recognised from Jaws – slowly becoming a child himself, obsessively making models of a mysterious tower, first out of shaving foam, then out of anything his can find; creating a fat mountain of junk and clay in his living room. In the process, Neary destroys his marriage. But as with Jaws, his real battle is with the authorities, who desperately want to cover up the existence of UFOs. Soon he finds the mountain he’s been seeking – Devil’s Tower in Idaho – along with Jillian, the single mother of the little boy who’s been abducted by an alien lifeforce in a terrifying scene earlier on. They both want the answers that everyone is withholding. The two join forces before the astonishing Mothership descends…

On the journey back from the cinema in the car, we couldn’t stop talking about the film. I remember the empty streets of Paris flying past, my head full of UFOs and the possibility that we are not alone. Close Encounters of the Third Kind had a dramatic effect on us both. But, as with The Spy Who Loved Me, I can see now that something deeper was going on. In Hanif Kureishi’s memoir of his father, My Ear at His Heart, he observes: ‘Whether they like it or not, children are always doing research into one marriage and discovering a great deal about disagreement, pleasure and the fate of love’. That ‘one marriage’ is, of course, your parents’ marriage, and we were no different in this regard. For the past two years, since our mother told us she didn’t love our father and was going to get a divorce, and the intrusion of our future stepfather, Keith, we had been trying to put the pieces together. And with very little help from outside. We knew no other families who had disintegrated like ours. At school, we were the only kids from a ‘broken home’ in our class. We were occasionally taunted for this and made to feel like damaged goods. James and I had spent a great deal of time observing our mother and father together in an attempt to make sense of their forced neutrality, their unconvincing lip-service to the notion of family, when, in all reality, we weren’t part of one any longer. Furthermore, the divorce hadn’t happened yet and we were still in limbo, living in the family home. For two years, apart from some weekends and the solo-parent trips to Paris and Norfolk, we’d barely seen our father. What had replaced him was Keith, and the spectacle of our mother’s all-consuming passion for him. That this had recently turned sour, with their house-shaking arguments, was even more perplexing. We were, as Kureishi writes, discovering much about disagreement and pleasure as we watched our mother and Keith prance around the living room to the disco hits of the day. Also as we cowered, in time-honoured fashion, behind the banisters, listening to them rowing after we’d been put to bed. Was this normal, we asked? Was this just what happened next? Did families always implode? Did love always give way to violence, recrimination, chaos?

Spielberg’s ‘Everyman trilogy’ of films, Jaws, Close Encounters, and later E.T., are, apart from superb entertainments, intense meditations on notions of family. Mark O’ Connell describes this aesthetic of ‘domestic disillusion’ well in Watching Skies, his book about Star Wars, Close Encounters and late-70s American Movies. Spielberg was himself the product of a broken home, and many of his films obsessively probe what that might mean for children caught up in their parents’ divorce; what it might mean for conceptions of family, of home, of innocence versus experience. We had already seen the Brody family in Jaws as a paragon of domestic stability; the unit that sticks together. In Close Encounters, we see the Nearys’ marriage disintegrate before our eyes. This held a potent charge for two nine-year-old twins sitting in a Right Bank cinema. We were witnessing something similar happen at home. The character of Jillian was affecting too. She was a single mother struggling on her own. For most of the time, when our father and stepfather were absent, our own mother was in this role. She was doing it all solo, while heroically trying to hold down a demanding NHS job. Later, it would feel even more like we were, to use the oxymoron, growing up in a ‘single-parent’ family. But all that was to come. At the time, we were just kids from a broken home, trying to make sense of it all. To make sense of absent fathers and violent stepfathers. Of parents in love with adults who you weren’t related to. Of emotional and physical violence, and its tainting intrusion into our young lives.

Beyond the Pale: The Worst Man in Literature

Readers are strangely proprietorial about the depraved Mickey Sabbath, the hero, anti-hero and villain of Philip Roth’s 1995 tour de force, Sabbath’s Theatre. Just what he does to deserve this affection over the course of 450 bile-filled pages is hard to fathom. He virtually defines that bête noire of creative writing courses, the Unsympathetic Character, and to discover such a monstrous creation on the page is a shock. Yet it is also a sweetly subversive experience - and this perhaps partially explains his appeal.

Here is a baddie with scale, mythical in his magnification. And yet he is no Pilate or Iago, merely a sad old man with a hard-on, raging against the dying of the light. Just as with Macbeth, the more flagrant Sabbath’s transgressions, the more we are dazzled by his outrageous glare. He’s a supernova of sin, or a Roman candle, at the very least, blazing away in Roth’s virtuoso paragraphs; blinding us with his astonishing misogyny, his exponential misanthropy, his audacious nihilism. How does Roth pull it off? (The expression is apt.) Or more accurately, how does he pull it off and still make us care?

For those not familiar with the novel, Sabbath is a puppeteer and disgraced academic in mourning for the death of his libidinous mistress, Drenka, “a conventional woman who would do anything”. Her enthusiasm was convenient, as Sabbath had decided to defy his own imminent demise by attempting to have as much sex as possible. As the book begins, Sabbath finds himself “six short years from seventy”, with “the game just about over”. He’s an old goat in rut, running from the void; he is also a man in perpetual crisis. In crisis over whether he’s a man or not. In crisis as to whether he ever recovered from his brother’s death in World War Two. In crisis over whether he can face his own death, or the defeat that comes before death: impotence. And not just sexual, but rhetorical impotence; the detumescence of voice, of verbal reach in the world. As one turns the pages, increasingly shaking one’s head in dismay, it’s clear that Mickey Sabbath is determined to have his say in full.

It’s clear, too, that Sabbath’s qualifications as a villain are many and varied. A sexual extremist and erotomaniac, he is also a sociopath extraordinaire. And a borderline paedeophile, if his rummaging in the knicker drawer of his best friend’s teenage daughter is anything to go by. A habitual liar, a graveyard onanist, a childless despiser of families and couples; a joyous micturator over all laughter, hope, goodness and wholesomeness (a peculiarly American obsession: see also David Lynch), Sabbath staggers us with his negativity.

And yet . . . and yet. Aren’t his hysterical riffs on death dangerously close to how we all feel when facing up to the Grim Reaper? If one can get past the notorious 20-page transcription of phone sex with his student (recording in shameful detail an act that divests him of his university tenure), isn’t Sabbath just telling it like it is? Indeed, early on, we discover that “Sabbath was a realist, ferociously a realist”. He is in a blind fury at “everything that was going”. Perhaps, the book suggests, we should be too. At the end of his life, Sabbath merely wants “more disastrous entanglement in everything”. And Roth’s looping, adventurous, syntactically dazzling sentences reinforce this. They perfectly convey Sabbath’s constant pushing at what’s permissible. And it’s not just the male protagonists of late Roth who gain from this magnification. The author’s sanctioned biographer, Claudia Roth Pierpont, comments that Drenka “enlarges the sense of female possibility, and that’s what heroines are for”. Of course, Roth rather ruins this reverence by having Sabbath masturbate on her grave (and he’s not the only character who does), but then someone always has to spoil things.

So why do we put up with him? (Sabbath, not Roth.) Are we just drawn by the villainous; those cynosures of evil such as Shakespeare’s Claudius or Dickens’s Bill Sikes? Interestingly, Dickens, writing pre-Freud, at least tempered his baddies with the suggestion that something bad was done to them in turn, early on. But this is not an option Roth explores. Sabbath is motiveless in his malignity, and the daily beauty of those around him makes him revel in his own ugliness. Maybe the reason we protect Sabbath from final censure is that he is so obviously a man afraid. As afraid as we are, in the face of an inevitable void.

The essay first appeared the Guardian

Passing Home: The Less Deceived

In the early 90s, living in a north London bedsit while trying to launch a band with my twin brother, I discovered the work of Philip Larkin. Or rather, I began seriously to read – and identify with – his verse. Before the publication of his letters which revealed repugnant racist views, Larkin had been a familiar, grumpy, avuncular figure in the 70s and early 80s, perhaps the most famous poet in the country bar John Betjeman. His much-parodied lines about your parents fucking you up were hard to avoid. By that point in my life, I was beginning to believe there was some truth in them.

Broke and alone – and attempting to write verse of my own when I wasn’t penning songs – I would read a Larkin poem on waking every morning. Lying there in my mould-mottled duvet, his lines about home (the sadness of it), family (or the lack of it), and love (ditto) were revelatory. Like old Mr Bleaney, I’d somehow managed to wash up in a ‘hired box’, living alone with the handful of possessions I’d rescued from my Hertfordshire hometown of Hitchin when my brother and I left at nineteen to seek our fame and fortune in the big city. But fame and fortune, or even a foot in the door of the music business, were proving elusive. Daily, I was beginning to feel the full intensity of Larkin’s notion that ‘how we live measures our nature’. I was twenty-three, yet I was living like one of the sad old men that haunt his poetry. The particular volume I read from every morning was Faber’s Collected Poems, which contained previously uncollected verse, such as the striking (and vaguely terrifying) ‘Love Again’, with its protagonist who finds himself wanking at ten past three. Its last stanza resonated with chilling efficiency. When the speaker asks himself how he got into such a sad and sorry mess, the answer returns as ‘something to do with violence a long way back/ And wrong rewards/ And arrogant eternity’.

Violence a long way back.

It was only in my early twenties when I really took stock of my parents’ divorce and what my brother and I had endured at the hands of our stepfather in the 1970s and on into the early 80s. It seemed as if violence – and the ever-present threat of it – was the sea we swam in back then. While Larkin didn’t address violence that frequently, it was there, as a subtext all the way through his four slim volumes of verse. Emotional violence, too. The type meted out by parents. Or indifferent lovers. Or society at large, and its endless pressure to conform, to succeed, to keep up with the dance or else you’ll invite failure.

In those bedsit days, there was a strong sense that my childhood had been a web of deception, of gaslighting and deliberate subterfuge. I felt violated, but guilty if I apportioned blame. Children, of course, always blame themselves for their parents’ disasters, but I was no longer a child. I was just trying to make sense of it all, groping around in the dark, trying to connect memory with meaning. The title of Larkin’s second volume, The Less Deceived, made a strong impression on me, though for a long time I had no idea what it meant. It was only when I discovered that he’d taken the lines from Shakespeare’s Ophelia, who complains of being ‘more deceived’ by Hamlet, that I finally understood it. To be more deceived is disastrous. I wanted to be less deceived by the past.

One of the poems from The Less Deceived that I returned to again and again was ‘I Remember, I Remember’. In this, the speaker finds themselves on a train travelling to their hometown of Coventry (which was also Larkin’s). Rather than the experience bringing comfort and a sense of warm nostalgia, of a connection to the speaker’s ‘roots’, they’re surprised to find themselves alienated; shocked at how much the place has changed and how little it means to them now.

The poem resonated so strongly with me because, by then, our mother had moved back to Yorkshire after her brief marriage to our stepfather had predictably failed. There she lived alone in a Dales’ village cottage, still working for the NHS, this time in triage at a local hospital. It was there we would visit her, making the two-hour train journey from Kings Cross to Leeds, which took us, at high speed, past Hitchin and Stevenage. While the train always made a stop at Stevenage, it never stopped at Hitchin. Apt, perhaps, as it seemed to reinforce the sense of the past being ungraspable; of it flying past unstoppably in a few seconds. And fortuitous, for if the train had stopped, I would have been tempted to get out and take a look around. As it turned out, I wouldn’t return to my hometown until I was in my early 30s. As Morrissey sang about his reluctance to go back to the old house, there were too many bad memories there.

It was Larkin’s poem about his childhood home that would travel with me when we made the journey up north. As the train approached Hitchin there would always be a moment of high emotion as its outlying fields flashed by; its spinneys and riverheads where I’d imagined the summer maenads and dryads dancing. And then the outlying dormitory estates and the bleak, blue-panelled footbridge over which we would trudge to school every morning, skimming a finger along its rail. And then the station itself, blurring past before I could take it all in, and finally the tatty sprawl of streets and breakers’ yards that announced Hitchin had come to an end. Of course, Larkin’s speaker has to debunk ‘the town that had once been “mine”’ with high satire; singling out all the places where their childhood epiphanies and fond memories never occurred. The garden where they weren’t spoken to by an old hat. The ‘splendid family’ they never ran to when they got depressed. The farm where they could be really themselves. In a couple of stanzas, a tirade of adult cynicism blasts away all innocence and youthful happiness. The speaker ends by wishing the place in hell.

Did I wish the same for Hitchin as it galloped past every time I took the train to visit my mother? Not quite. I could never so brutally consign the past to the fires of Hades. But the poem made me wonder whether I should. Whether, by holding on to the past, I was merely perpetuating its pain.

Paris on the Page: Writing the Impossible

‘We’ll always have Paris,’ as Bogart famously drawled to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, alluding both to their own affair and the city’s enduring quality of romantic vivacity; its embodiment of Eros versus the forces of Thanatos, in this case represented by World War II. He doesn’t have to elaborate on what Paris symbolises; its superabundance of light and love, its promise of amorous adventure. Not many cities are so neatly metonymic. Yet the title of Andrew Gallix’s excellent anthology of Parisian writing, We’ll Never Have Paris (2019), seems to sum up the experience of writing a Parisian novel more accurately. It catches the tantalising, ineffable quality of the city, one that becomes more apparent as you try to capture it on the page. Writing about Paris – like writing about London or New York– can feel like a thankless task. As Hemingway said, ‘There is never any ending to Paris’.

The first challenge is: how to put this embarrassment of riches on the page?
The second is: What’s left to say? Every metre of every boulevard, every cobblestone, has been described to death. Yet, despite the obvious setbacks of over-familiarity, and the dead hand of romanticised iterations of the city in fiction, poetry and memoir, writers across more than four centuries have found plenty new to say about La Ville Lumière.

Any novelist who’s ever begun a book set in a city they’re not entirely familiar with will know the following sensation, usually reached after a couple of pages: give up now. Set the book anywhere but your chosen famous and glamorous location. Even if it has to be Milton Keynes. The sheer level of your ignorance, coupled with the weight of words already in existence about your fabulous urban landscape (the one that was supposed to subtly mirror your characters’ lives, to reinforce your book’s themes and symbolism, to become a character in itself), prevents you from writing another word. Quietly shelve this idea and write – as the creative writing course instructs – about what you know.

However, if you can get past this popular injunction and absolutely must set your novel in Paris, you’re left with the following options: in-the-field research, or reading a lot of books about the place. The first option might appear to be more profitable, but, as I found out while writing my own contemporary, Paris-set second novel, Jacob’s Advice, seeing how others had done the city on the page was more illuminating. Certainly cheaper. Short of being born in France’s capital, or moving there (and many writers from Saul Bellow to Geoff Dyer have done just that), you’ll never really strike that authentic note. And so, drawing on intense childhood memories of holidays in Pars, plus one short but equally intense research trip, I set out to find Paris on the page.

The books I found most instructive while writing Jacob’s Advice weren’t by the obvious authors or the coolest candidates. No Walter Benjamin, Perec or Modiano. Instead, it was the nineteenth-century canon, which I went about methodically, that provided the best guide. I began with Victor Hugo, side-stepping the monolith of Les Misérables, and opting for The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831).

Hugo thought the pointed gothic ogees of the Notre Dame’s windows mirrored humanity’s ascent from the gutter to a state of grace and enlightenment. Certainly, this quintessentially Parisian novel seems to be as concerned with architecture as with the grand historical melodrama of Quasimodo and his love for Esmeralda. In one astonishing digression lasting a whole chapter (beginning with the sexist line: ‘Our female readers will forgive us if we pause for a moment’), Hugo elaborates on his humanist philosophy, connecting the Romantic spirit of the age with the ever-upward movement of gothic architecture. Earlier, in a chapter entitled ‘A Bird’s Eye View of Paris’, the same authorial voice paints a vivid picture of the fifteenth-century city:

In the centre, the Île de la Cité, looking in shape like an enormous tortoise, with its bridges, scaly with tiles, protruding like paws from under underneath the grey carapace of roofs… Through it all, the Seine, our ‘foster-mother Seine’…obstructed by islands, bridges and boats. Right the way round, an immense plain, a patchwork of every kind of cultivation dotted with lovely villages…

Similarly effusive is Balzac, a writer who describes less, but knows the heart better. Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837-43) is the archetypal novel of a young man on the make in a society; one that’s far crueller and more indifferent than he first imagines. Aspiring poet Lucien Chardon arrives in Paris with only his wit and good looks to live on. The novel ends with him lamenting ‘Who will love me?’ In this socially panoramic novel of love and ambition, Balzac captures the vertiginous excitement of finding yourself young and in Paris for the first time:

Here is the habitat of writers, thinkers, poets. Here only can the seeds of fame be sown… Here only can writers find, in the museums and art collections, the immortal works of past genius to warm and stimulate the imagination. Here only vast libraries, always open, offer knowledge and sustenance for the mind. In short, in Paris, in the very air one breaths and the smallest details of existence, there is a spirit which permeates… One learns more in half an hour, chatting in café and theatres, than one learns in the provinces in ten years.

This note of revulsion at the parochial is struck in Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (1885), another classic Parisian novel that puts a young, socially ambitious man at its centre, though one informed by Maupassant’s characteristic blend of salaciousness and high morality. Georges Duroy is more ruthless than Balzac’s Lucien, with none of his vulnerabilities; qualities which help him ascend from lowly clerk to the highest echelons of society. A strikingly modern novel, despite being first published over a hundred and thirty years ago, its picture of a demi-monde of prostitutes, drinkers and urban hustlers is unmatched:

He was fond of the places where whores congregated, he liked their dance-halls, their cafes, their streets; he liked rubbing shoulders with them, talking and chatting familiarly with them, inhaling their cheap pungent perfumes, feeling them all around… The large cafes were crammed to overflowing with their customers spread out all over the pavement, drinking under the harsh light of their brilliantly illuminated terraces. On the little round or square tables, there were glasses of liquids of every hue, brown and red, yellow and green while the limpid cylinders of ice sparked invitingly in their decanters of ice-cold water.

As ever, it’s the details that most evoke a city, give us a sure sense of place. Here the care Maupassant takes in lavishly describing the drinks puts us vividly in the scene. Similarly, Zola was at pains to describe (and keep describing) a physical location until the reader almost feels they’ve lived there themselves. In Thérèse Raquin (1868), the dank arcade that houses Madame Raquin’s haberdashery shop, and where Therese plans the murder of her husband Camille along with her lover Laurent, is obsessively adumbrated. The Passage du Pont-Neuf is ‘no place to go for a stroll… a dark corridor connecting rue Mazarine and rue de Seine’:

At night the arcade is lit by three gas jets in heavy square lanterns. These gas jets hang from the glass roof, onto which they cast up passages of lurid light, while they send down palely luminous circles that dance fitfully and now and again seem to disappear altogether. Then the arcade takes on the sinister look of a real cutthroat alley…

The same atmosphere of dimly lit menace pervades Zola’s later novel L’Assommoir (1877). Gritty, garrulous and altogether ahead of its time, L’Assommoir (sometimes translated as The Dram Shop, but more accurately ‘The Boozer’, or ‘the place where you can get knocked out’), reveals a Paris only hinted at in the works of Balzac and Hugo. The working-class underbelly of a city has never been so savagely depicted, with the novel anticipating the alternative Parisian narratives of Orwell and Henry Miller, also Virginie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex trilogy. Full of drugs, sex, and 90s music, Vernon Subutex 1(2015), the first part of Despentes’ trilogy, depicts a magnificently deviant Paris. Its hero, Vernon, starts as the owner of hip record store Revolver in Bastille, and ends up couch-surfing, snorting coke, drinking and eventually living on the streets. The three books are a return to the unvarnished Paris of Zola, and an antidote to portrayals of the city that have become overly romanticised over the years.

One of the major challenges an English-speaking novelist faces in putting Paris on the page is the dialogue. Should the Parisian characters speak English, or French? Or an awkward combination of the two? And if everyone speaks English, does the speech have to render the French accent, ‘Allo, ‘Allo!-style? Henry James’s novel The American (1877) never quite gets this right. His tale of New World values meeting the corruption of Old World Europe can sometimes feel as if the (mainly) Parisian setting is secondary. This is largely the fault of the dialogue, which is so formal we forget the characters are walking around the Louvre and not 1870s Boston. Yet the story of naïve businessman Charles Newman’s first encounter with the sinful city is oddly memorable, and one that kicks off the great tradition of writing about Americans in Paris. Only in the twentieth century did the ex-pat Parisian novel really get going, with Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), and later, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956)

Baldwin’s sensitively written story of the love between an American and a French bartender was one of the first gay novels of the post-war period. Though his characters are white, the novel contains much of Baldwin’s experience of being a Black American in Paris: ‘Mist clung to the river… clinging like a curse to the men who slept beneath the bridges – one of whom flashed by beneath us, very black and lone’. Lyrical and drenched in authentic Parisian atmosphere, it’s a complex exploration of alienation and identity. What’s more, unlike Henry James’s novel, its dialogue convinces the reader the action is actually set in Paris. It achieves this, paradoxically, by having its native Parisians speak in an odd mix of French and English:

‘Eh bien, ma chérie, comment vas tu? I have not seen you for a long time.’

‘But I have been awfully busy,’ said Jacques.

‘I don’t doubt it! Aren’t you ashamed, vieille folle?’

‘Et toi? You certainly don’t seem to have been wasting your time.’

Another counter-intuitive method of rendering Paris on the page is not to describe it at all. Jean Rhys’s 1928 novel Quartet is a good example of this principle in action, and one that seems true to the experience of her characters. A view seen a thousand times is a view ignored, after all. Rhys’s reluctance to describe Paris in all her novels set in the city was, according to her lover and mentor Ford Maddox Ford, an attempt to deromanticize the topography. This she certainly achieves in this booze-soaked story of Marya and her solitary struggle to stay afloat in Montparnasse. If Rhys does depict Paris overtly, it’s only ever to mirror her protagonist’s inner world. The rue saint-Jacques becomes ‘the street of homeless cats’, perfectly describing Marya’s emotional state as she walks its pavements.

Another method of bringing Paris to life is to only set a small part of your book there. The juxtaposition between the City of Light and the drabness of the other locations provides the charge. In Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française (2004), the occupation of Paris in June 1940, and the ensuing exodus, is vividly depicted in a novel which only survived after Némirovsky’s notebooks were unearthed by her daughters in 1998. The author herself didn’t survive the war. She was deported to Auschwitz and murdered in the Holocaust. Though the majority of the book is set in Vichy France, Paris is a constant presence as a place of return; a cynosure of Resistance in a country on its knees.

Annie Ernaux’s The Years (2008) works on a similar principle. Published in France in 2008, but only available in English in its superb translation by Alison L. Strayer in 2017, this is novelist and school-teacher Ernaux’s meditative history of post-war France as seen through the prism of her own life. Though much of the book is set outside Paris, the city is central to Ernaux’s escape from provincial Normandy, and the intimate story of family, divorce, child-rearing and her own pursuit of sexual and intellectual independence.

The list of non-fiction about Paris is even more daunting for the struggling novelist than the fiction. But an intelligent navigation of it can bring rich rewards. The place most start is Ernest Hemingway’s A Movable Feast (1964). Lauren Elkin, in her book Flâneuse, admits that at twenty the Paris book she revered above all others was A Moveable Feast, whereas now she would be ‘too embarrassed to be seen in Paris holding a copy of it’. There’s something in Hemingway’s tableaux of writing a whole short story in a cafe before polishing off a dozen oysters and a pichet of crisp white wine that’s irresistibly romantic to the younger reader. However, his sad portrait of Fitzgerald as an alcoholic unable to hold his drink shows it’s the work of a mature writer looking back at his younger, wilder days. And a very male account, as many have pointed out.

Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse (2016) provides a female perspective on much the same material: young writer trying to write in Paris. In this subversive take on the figure of the aimless city wanderer, Elkin finds that there have always been female flaneurs, despite the manifest difficulties of walking the boulevards while female. The book is at its best when delving deep into the relationship between women artists such as Agnès Varda, Jean Rhys and George Sand and the Paris they depict in their work. Likewise, Edmund White’s The Flâneur (2001) gives the perspective of a gay man in Paris, equally eager to write and find his place in the world. One of the few works by a man that admits the flâneur can be of either gender, White’s supremely readable account of his years in Paris and his favourite artists packs a lot into its two hundred pages. Like Elkin’s book, there’s much meditation about being an American in Paris. It’s equally involving when discussing White’s beloved novelists such as Proust, Baldwin and Colette.

While writing Jacob’s Advice, I found any number of standard histories of the Paris helpful, though not all of them put the city vibrantly on the page. Graham Robb’s Parisians (2010) is one that does. A solid, approachable, detailed history of Paris and its inhabitants from the Revolution to the Sarkozy era, the book convinces us that the history of Paris belongs as much to its revolutionaries, spies and prostitutes as its great writers and statesmen. Another that brings the city masterfully to life is Alistair Horne’s The Seven Ages of Paris (2002). Published before Graham Robb’s book, Alistair Horne’s panoptic history of Paris, from the twelfth century to Les jours de Mai of’68 is perhaps the superior volume. Dramatic and immaculately researched, it’s essential for an understanding of how Paris became the city it is today.

There were also more than a few memoirs that seemed to nail the ineffable quality of living in the city. One such memoir was Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon (2000). When New Yorker writer and Francophile Gopnik decided to move his family to Paris in 1995 he became an unwitting foreign correspondent. This finely observed, erudite, funny account was the result:

Paris was the site of the most beautiful commonplace civilisation there has ever been: cafes, brasseries, parks, lemons on trays, dappled light on bourgeois boulevards… and windows like doors everywhere you look.

Another excellent guide was John Baxter’s The Most Beautiful Walk in the World (2011). A discursive love letter to the city, that manages to tell the story of the Lost Generation of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Joyce as well as underground Montmartre along the way. Baxter is an easy and loquacious walking companion, and a reliable source of local knowledge and Parisian tradition, from ‘scarfmanship’ (the correct way to fold your scarf) to how to avoid being a plouc (a gullible fool or mug). Another memoir was Kati Marton’s Paris: A Love Story (2012). Found in a charity shop, and not on any Paris reading lists, it’s a highly personal account of living in Paris by a former ABC News correspondent. Marton’s book is the story of how she lost her first husband and made a new life for herself with Paris as the backdrop. From her days as a Left Bank student who lived through Les jours de Mai, to later visits as a successful broadcast journalist on the opulent Right Bank, the book is a reminder of how a city can shape a whole life.

So, a few books have successfully managed to convey the banquet of riches that is Paris. Of course, the above choices are highly selective. When it comes to novelists who’ve caught the authentic aroma of the city, I could equally have included Dumas (père et fils), Sartre, or Françoise Sagan. The trick always, for the novelist, is to remember the job is to evoke, not to document. You’re not writing the guidebook, after all. And encountering a writer’s research on the page is always deadly. We’ve all read novels too eager to convince us that the action is set in a specific place. On every page there’s an exhaustive delineation of the topography, a nugget of folklore, a badly rendered local accent. The sense of place is overloaded. In John Mullan’s book How Novels Work, he makes the distinction between ‘location’ and ‘setting’. A location is merely the physical place, whereas the setting is somewhere seen through a particular pair of eyes. ‘There is, for instance, a striking Anglo-American tradition of novels with European settings, where any sense of place is also a sense of being out of place, a tourist [italics mine]’. This is essential in both fiction and non-fiction.

Lastly, there is the phenomenon of ‘Paris Syndrome’, the feeling of disappointment on seeing the city in the flesh, largely created by the body of Parisian literature. When I did finally make it over to Paris for a day of in-the-field research on Jacob’s Advice, on a rain-wracked November day, I was grateful not to experience this. Though not a spring day, one for which the city is justly famous, I found Paris to be as spectacular and fresh as I remembered. It might be a cliché, but Paris remakes itself with every visit; with every walk along the melancholy quais, every crème at a new terrasse, every glance up at a Hausmann balcon. Hemingway was right: you’ll never reach the end.

This essay first appeared in The London Magazine

The Happiest Man Alive: My Iranian Uncle

In March 1977, our favourite aunt, Paula, married her Iranian fiancé, Yaghoub, in Oxford. With no aspirations to be an actress, unlike her younger sister, Paula was gloriously, unselfconsciously unadorned. I can’t recall her ever wearing make-up. She was never less than true to herself. To avoid having to do anything with her hair she wore a silk, colourfully patterned headscarf permanently attached to her head. Even her wedding dress was a simple red-and-cream mid-ankle number from Dorothy Perkins, coupled with white court shoes (the nearest she came to heels in the time I knew her). Her big day was the only time I remember her letting her hair down, which was revealed as long and abundant with faint streaks of grey. A research fellow working on tropical diseases at Oxford Brookes, Paula embodied what might be called a ‘lively intelligence’. She had a twinkle, a cerebral sparkle, behind her big, round, foggy spectacles. Ask her anything and she seemed to know it, from the length of the Amazon to the formation of igneous rocks. There was a mental spring in her step which my brother James and I took to at once. And she was motherly, or rather homely, in a way our own mother increasingly wasn’t, with her blue eyeshadow, perfume and exercise routines designed to please our stepfather.

Paula had met her fiancé in Iran when she was over there in the early seventies doing vital research on the carcinogens in cigarettes. This work obviously didn’t deter her new boyfriend from smoking. I remember Yaghoub’s big flat packets of Dunhills, the smoke rising around his wide-collared shirts. He was tall and wiry, with a dark, pointy beard and kindly eyes behind topaz lenses. His face bore an incredible map of pockmarks, the result of adolescent acne; an affliction I never feared when it arrived at thirteen, as I felt its after-effects gave you character. And Yaghoub certainly had character. A whiskey drinker, a player of backgammon, a teller of tall tales, we loved him from the start. He was gentle and quietly mischievous in a way that our stepfather could never be. His name sounded impossibly exotic to us. Persian culture was about as far removed from a small town in Hertfordshire as you could imagine. His warmth and charm won us over at once. It was a Middle Eastern charm: courteous and seemingly endless. He delighted in us when he and Paula visited; playing football in the back garden; helping us construct a train set on the living room table, encouraging us to play with his puppy, which he called Mushy; a name we found endlessly amusing. Looking back, I can see he wanted children of his own and was practising. Although, it has to be said, he was a natural.

When we visited them in their second-floor flat, the first thing you’d notice was the enticing smell of the rice cooker – a new innovation for us, and a welcoming one: it seemed to advertise this was a home, not a transient place. To this day, the smell of burnt basmati rice reminds me of Yaghoub. When they married and moved to a proper house backing on to the Oxford canal, the aroma of the rice cooker would remain constant. Later, he would teach me to fish on this canal, taking me out with our rods to catch tiny perch which we always put back in to watch swim away. He also allowed me to steer the small boat he eventually bought, named Yasha after his first-born. My memories of him are full of warmth and smiles. With our own parents’ marriage disintegrating, parental or fatherly guidance was in short supply. I remember Yaghoub providing this for a while. I remember, too, the yeasty smell of his home-brewed beer – a potent drink he would serve to our father after dinner, and which we were forbidden, though I recall him allowing us the odd sneaky sip. Looking back, I can see how rare it was for an English family to have a multicultural marriage in such close proximity, but it didn’t seem strange then. For us, it had the effect of normalising mixed-race relationships. The casual – and not-so-casual – racism we later witnessed at secondary school seemed disgraceful and cruel: it was always practised by people who never had any Black or Asian friends, let alone an amazing Persian uncle, like we did.

On Paula and Yaghoub’s wedding day, which was a small but joyous occasion, I remember feeling it was odd that both my mother and father were there together outside of the house. The last time I remember this happening was on our trip to Paris a year before. So much had changed since then. Yet there they were among the throng, with most people sitting cross-legged on the floor due to a lack of chairs, packed like anchovies into the cramped Oxford flat. My brother and I were tasked with doing the rounds with plates of nibbles. Photos from the day reveal we were sporting matching blue zip-up cardigans and Brian Jones’ haircuts. The florid late-70s clothes are like a time-capsule. Dagger-collared shirts. Deafening neckerchiefs. Angle-length maxi skirts patterned like old curtains. My father, conservative as ever, is in a plain tan pullover, shirt and matching slacks. For some reason, he’s sporting a moustache, the only evidence that seismic change has occurred in his – and my – life over the past year.

We must have stayed the night as there are photos of us around the circular dining table the following day; our granny looking tired and flushed. In these snaps, Paula’s hair is safely back under its headscarf. She sits grinning next to Yaghoub who’s wearing the most incredible pair of bell-bottom jeans and a tight T-shirt. Before them is an array of chocolate-brown Habitat ceramics, a wedding present perhaps. The best photos are of me and James with Yaghoub, sitting side by side on the sofa in matching navy tanktops, our uncle with his arms around us, all of us grinning wide. Happy in a way we could never be at home any more.

At least for now. The happiness wouldn’t last for Yaghoub. When the Shah of Iran fell in 1979, he found it was too dangerous to return to Tehran because of his liberal politics. While there was no fatwa as such, he knew he could never go back safely. It was a great sorrow to him. Yet the greatest sorrow came twenty-five years later when his first-born son, Yasha, was killed by accidental electrocution on a railway line. Yasha was just 21, and had been out celebrating with friends after receiving his degree result, a first in Philosophy. The coroner’s verdict was death by misadventure. Yaghoub never really recovered. He passed away in 2018, still visibly broken by this family tragedy. But back in 1977, he was, for a brief moment, the happiest man alive.

In 1977, The Spy Who Loved Me was the first ‘grown-up’ film my twin brother and I were exposed to on the big screen. But before our epiphany at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly (now defunct), there were two other cinema visits; one with our father, and the other, with our stepfather, the dastardly Keith.

Perhaps emboldened by taking us to see Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday on an Easter visit to Paris, our dad drove us to the chilly barn that was the Letchworth Broadway to see the biggest blockbuster of the day, Jaws. How he managed to smuggle two eight-year-olds into an A-rated film (a certificate that caused controversy at the time) is still a mystery. But take us he did, maybe after explaining to our mother that it would be educational given our (by then waning) interest in sharks and creatures of the deep. Jaws was an unforgettable experience, but for mainly the wrong reasons. The sheer terror of the opening sequence scarred me for life. When the discordant cello theme began and the Nordic beach beauty is dragged under by an unseen terror, I resolved never to go swimming again. Not even in a swimming pool. The subsequent shark attacks on Amity’s stricken bay were harrowing; although, given our love of gore and violence learnt from Battle comic, there was something queasily thrilling about seeing so much blood fountaining everywhere. The moment that gave me nightmares for a whole year was when Police Chief Brody and the Oceanographer Hooper go out to investigate Ben Gardiner’s abandoned boat at night. When Hooper points a flashlight at the mysteriously damaged hull of the vessel and Gardiner’s chewed-up head pops out I think I jumped out of my skin. An out-of-body experience, but not the pleasurable variety provided by The Spy Who Loved Me. It was a grisly, wholly unexpected shock, one I still shiver to remember decades later.

Like the Bond films, Jaws was full of reversals, but they were harsh, adult surprises. What wasn’t apparent at the time was how much the secure family set-up of the Brody family affected me. Spielberg would go on to become the celluloid poet of broken homes, with his depiction of young lives affected by separation and divorce in both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. Here he presents a family that stays together with a strong father who deeply loves his wife and children. When Ellen Brody asks her husband, ‘Want to get drunk and fool around?’ it’s clear their sexual relationship is still alive. They are flirtatious and affectionate with each other in a way our parents never were. Keith’s imposture at home, his sloppy wooing of our mother, was wholly transgressive. It should have been our father doing the dancing around the living room with our mum, not Keith.

There was something deeply moving in the scene of Brody at home, late at night, flipping through books depicting shark attacks with a rising sense of horror. He understood without question that his duty was to protect the citizens of Amity from danger, but even more so, his own wife and children. Furthermore, his children were our age, as was the poor boy on the Lilo who gets shredded alive when the mayor fails to close the beach. Brody was a father who stayed, who didn’t leave to work in another country, as our father had done a few years before. The final scene of Brody and Hooper, kicking back to shore on a piece driftwood, seemed congruent with a father fulfilling his duty to protect the family unit. Of course he survives. He has to. As with every mythic tale of defeating an outside threat – from Beowulf to Alien – Jaws was all about protecting the sanctity of the family, as well as the wider community.

At the time, I didn’t realise how much the third-act scenes on board the Orca were shaping my notions of masculinity. Here were three men together, facing danger with varying degrees of stoicism, humour and resourcefulness. The scene where the three share their scars is a beautiful piece of screenwriting. While Robert Shaw’s Quint can boast about surviving the wreck of the USS Indianapolis in WWII, Brody and Hooper need to save face and present their own pitiful war wounds. It’s insightful and funny and sad all at once. There was a pecking order, I could see, among males, and it was usually the one with the loudest voice at the top. Keith, with his overbearing masculinity, his Alpha-male force, was clearly an apex-predator. Quint is also an apex predator until he’s eaten by one; the Great White shark snaffling up his legs and half the boat in the film’s terrifying final scenes. In my happiest moments, I daydreamed about Keith meeting the same fate.

Suitably chastened by Jaws, we began a brief flirtation with the horror genre. Along with buying second-hand Bond paperbacks at our local indie bookstore, we sought out Peter Benchley’s novel on which Spielberg’s masterpiece was based. I still have my battered copy with its gothic font and the impossibly huge shark heading for the naked ‘Summer Girl’ (as Amity’s mayor dismisses her) on the surface. There were also film tie-ins of The Exorcist, The Omen, and Orca the Killer Whale, as well as schlock by James Herbert and Steven King. This fascination with the macabre must have led to me seeing the B-movie horror flick Grizzly at Hitchin’s Regal cinema in May 1977. On the night I went, my brother was ill, so my mother stayed at home to look after him while Keith drove me to the big, chilly auditorium (why were all 70s cinemas so cold?) of the town’s fleapit. The Regal was opened in 1939 at the height of Hollywood’s golden era. An Art-Deco wonder inside, its exterior was curiously drab. You could walk past it and not be enticed in, unlike most of the classic 1930s cinemas. I didn’t know it then, but the place would close in a few months, laying dormant from September 1977 to its reinvention as a music venue in the early eighties, attracting everyone from the Smiths to the Style Council.

Grizzly was a much flimsier, stupider film than Jaws, but I convinced myself I was enjoying seeing the limbs of intrepid woodsmen torn from their bodies. I resolved there and then never to go into the woods at the bottom of the lane we lived on without serious weaponry. It was a strange, unnerving experience. As with Jaws, it’s a wonder I got in to see the film in the first place. Part of the uneasiness of the experience was being alone with Keith. He sat a little too close to me the whole time, his arm occasionally snaking round my shoulder, giggling at the goriest scenes as if he was watching an episode of Are You Being Served? There was so much cognitive dissonance (as no one called it then), I left the cinema confused and disappointed. At home, his mixture of sadism and sentimentality, his unpredictability, made me very scared of him. Paradoxically, he was at his scariest when he was doing anything nice, like taking you to the cinema, though this was to prove a one-off.

The fact was, although I hated Keith to my very bones, there was a countervailing, and counterintuitive, urge to love him too. Of course I wanted to trust him, to love him, and for him to love me. A child of eight believes people are fundamentally good and have your best interests at heart. My mother had welcomed this man into our family so I should at least try to like him, if not treat him like a surrogate father. However, Keith was fundamentally unlovable. Any show of affection from me would be rebuffed or, I can see now, ridiculed. In truth, he just wanted me and my brother to disappear so he could get on with living with our mother, unimpeded. He wanted her to himself. And though this was never overtly stated, it seeped into everything, like seawater into the sinking Orca.

While my brother was jealous that I’d been to see Grizzly, in retrospect I wished I’d never gone. The reason being that the experience would be forever tainted by Keith, and his ‘nice’ gesture of taking me. It’s incredible to think he never took us to kick a football about, something our father wouldn’t dream of doing. In fact, he only ever performed two selfless acts for his partner’s children in the time he was with us. The first was buying a family cat, a gesture ruined by naming it ‘Pussy’. The second was taking us to a playground in Stevenage’s quaint Old Town on a sunny afternoon at the start of the summer holidays. We were there for three glorious hours. Though he didn’t bring a football, he took many pictures. I still have them. In these, we’re flying on swings or scaling a climbing frame in our matching Six Million Dollar Man T-shirts, our hair golden in the light of July; the light that is young once only, as Dylan Thomas wrote in ‘Fernhill’, his great poem of childhood. We look like mini-Bee Gees. The playground seems curiously deserted, as if he’s hired it for the occasion. But the unforced smiles on our faces attest to the fact that we had fun. Which is not how I remember the day, strangely enough, when I come to think of it now.

In Plain Sight: The Dark Side of the 70s

The 1970s is often characterised humorously as the Decade that Taste Forgot, with its kitschy clothes and tacky sitcoms. But there was a darker, nightmarish side to the decade, too; a special atmosphere of dissipation and menace embodied by the Yorkshire Ripper, and two other serial killers whose sprees of depravity only surfaced years later. While my brother and I gambolled in our grandmother’s garden, Fred West, a man described memorably by Martin Amis as ‘troglodytic’, was torturing and murdering eleven young women, aided by his wife Rosemary, in a faceless Gloucester family house. By the time we moved to a Wimpey estate (ironically named The Poets’ Estate) with our newly divorced district-nurse mother in 1978, Scottish civil servant Dennis Nilsen had begun his squalid campaign of killing and dismemberment, murdering at least fifteen young men over the next four years in a quiet corner of Muswell Hill. All three of these monstrous men changed the way the nation viewed the decade in retrospect. They even challenged notions of how society functioned and cohered. Under the surface of so-called normal domestic life, away from the forced jollity of 70s camp comedians such as Larry Grayson, or kids’ shows such as It’s a Knockout!, appalling crimes were being committed behind innocuous net curtains.

And paedophilia seemed to be everywhere, too. And nowhere. If it wasn’t happening in institutions it was perpetrated in secret at home, where statistically most child abuse occurs. The sexually abusive uncle or stepparent is a cliché. Because of the prevailing societal taboo against bringing the subject up, most of these abuses and assaults went undetected for years, until the culture shifted to one of disclosure, punitive measures and therapy. Back then, if you did speak up, you weren’t believed. You were told you had ‘an over-active imagination’. It was almost as if the grown-ups had been awarded a seigneurial right to interfere sexually with their children, or children in their care. The nonce, or the short-eyes, was everywhere if you cared to look hard enough; hanging around the school gates, in parks, or passing as a pillar of the community. It was this social smokescreen that allowed Jimmy Savile to operate with impunity. When the staggering scale of his abuses was revealed, there were ostentatious displays of contrition and much handwringing. It was all so obvious, they wailed. He was hiding in plain sight. But it was clear some people inside the BBC knew what he was up to. Even John Lydon of the Sex Pistols knew Savile was a monster. In a BBC interview that was never aired, he said: ‘I want to kill Jimmy Savile – he’s a hypocrite. I bet he’s into all kinds of seediness that we all know about but aren’t allowed to talk about. I know some rumours…’ And yet hundreds of children were still allowed into Savile’s orbit, invited to realise their dreams on national television. All of this added to a sense of wayward laissez-faire in the late seventies. There were no rules, or if there were, they were there to be broken by depraved chancers like Savile. As 70s kids, we were told to go out and play and not talk to strangers, but our parents and guardians underestimated the danger out there. Or they were the danger themselves.

On a more global scale, it was a decade of Cold War freeze and blood-drunk dictators. In Cambodia, Pol Pot was slaughtering millions of his own people, a grisly legacy memorialised in Bruce Robinson’s great film, The Killing Fields. And the fall-out from the Vietnam war was still intense. In 1978, two of the biggest movies (and ones we were too young to see) were Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. De Niro’s bearded face was never off the cover of our issues of Film Review and Photoplay, with dramatic pictures inside of him in his vigorous prime, aiming a hunting rifle; or Christopher Walken with a pistol to his sweating head surrounded by jeering Vietcong dicers. Why the film was called The Deer Hunter, we were never sure as we doubted there were many deer in Saigon. It was clear these films were necessary for America to salve the collective trauma and guilt of the war. The following year, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was similarly everywhere. By this time, we were collecting anything connected with movies, knocking on the door of the Stevenage ABC’s box office and begging for posters once a film’s run was over. One of these was Apocalypse Now, and we coveted the haunting image of the choppers on the dawn raid, superimposed over Brando’s Easter Island face, all refracted through a fug of Agent Orange.

On the domestic front, the snowy winter of 1978 to ‘79 became synonymous with one phrase: The Winter of Discontent. Strikes. Shortages. Picket lines and snow. It was this we lived through during our first months in the new house. In Dominic Sandbrook’s Seasons in the Sun: Britain, 1974-1979, he skilfully evokes the late-70s atmosphere of economic and social decline; of ‘pornography on the newsstands and nudity on the television, a world of splintered communities, atomised families and moral confusion’. While Britain’s loss of status as a world power had been in effect since the end of WWII, the seventies seemed to accelerate a sense of national entropy, with endless trade union disputes, race riots and spiralling crime statistics. Sandbrook dates our ‘national humiliation’ from 1975, when the UK had to beg from the IMF to save its tanking economy. Things swiftly went downhill from there, despite the avuncular Callaghan taking over from the exhausted Wilson as PM.

To two young boys, politics appeared to be an interchangeable parade of ancient men. While our mother took little interest in current affairs, except when it affected the NHS, our father on his weekly return from Paris (where he had moved for work) would listen unstoppably to the worsening news on Radio 4. Or he would sit ignoring us, turning the pages of his Telegraph, which had once been the Guardian at the start of the decade. Despite going on an Aldermaston CND March in the early sixties, the trajectory of his own politics had followed that of Kingsley Amis, shifting from moderate left to immoderate right over ten years. Now he was ranting about Marxists in our universities, football hooligans, the ballooning Welfare State, scroungers, sociologists and feminists.

The financial squeeze of the late seventies resulted in a perfect storm. The Winter of Discontent began quietly enough in a corner of Essex. The down-tools at the Dagenham car plant led to a hauliers’ strike, with the tanker and lorry drivers taking industrial action over pay and conditions. This soon led to petrol shortages and an acute strain on essential goods in shops. I remember there being queues everywhere; interminable waits as our father filled up his blue Citroen, or when our mother dragged us around Safeways. Soon all the low-paid public sector workers were coming out in support of the truckers. Even thousands of BBC staff walked out five days before Christmas, threatening the cosy predictability of the Yuletide Two Ronnies show. For many, this signalled the end of civilisation as they knew it. At the time, I distinctly recall asking my mother why the nurses didn’t strike too: ‘Because people would die,’ she replied, her tone carrying all the thwartedness of committing your life to The Caring Profession.

In the end, the nurses were pretty much the only low-paid workers who didn’t take industrial action, though hospitals were severely disrupted when ancillary staff withdrew their labour. A gravediggers’ strike even meant corpses went unburied for a while. On our trips to London to the Vintage Magazine Shop, we were startled by the mountains of ebony rubbish sacks piled up in Leicester Square, fifteen-feet high, the result of a refuse worker’s strike. The smell of London now wasn’t so much that of intoxicating diesel fumes and enticing chow mein, but the reek of rotting garbage. The whole city stank of terminal financial and moral decay. Strangely enough, it all seemed apt now that our dream of childhood sanctuary had flown, replaced by the freezing, dank, wasteland of The Poets’ Estate. It would take a number of months for the ice to thaw, announcing the false of dawn of the shiny, shameless 1980s.

When the Orwell Prize for Political Writing broadened its remit in 2019 to include fiction, its first awards went to two northern Irish writers: Anna Burns for her boldly experimental novel, Milkman, and Patrick Radden Keefe for his forensic investigative account, Say Nothing. Both were worthy winners, making strong contributions to the growing body of Troubles literature, alongside David Keenan’s blistering For the Good Times, and Jenny McCartney’s quieter take on 1990s Northern Ireland, The Ghost Factory. The fact the Orwell Prize only opened up to political fiction six years ago - perhaps in response to Brexit and Trump’s first term as US president - was symptomatic not just of the times, but of a growing desire by readers to explore political issues through novels, and not just works of non-fiction. Yet the old question still remains: do politics and fiction make for uneasy bedfellows? Does one, as it were, fatally undermine the other?

Novels, poetry and drama have always reflected the eras in which they were written, from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (which led to his exile from Rome), to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kyd’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (for Scotland and Italy, read the Jacobean court), to Kafka’s parables of totalitarianism. While a work of the imagination may or may not always contain reliable historical information (a novel is full of ‘facts and pseudo-facts’, as AS Byatt commented), it can be said to ‘know’ as much about a given subject as the hard data and statistics presented in works of history or political theory.

A dramatic rendering of a political moment can often be more compelling than a dry factual account. Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poesie and Poems argued (contra Plato) that art was superior to the historical record; because while history gives us only ‘what men have done’, poets ‘deliver a golden [world]’. If history gives us the Marc Antony, Shakespeare gives us a particular Marc Antony. In this respect, novelists who explore the present political moment have to possess an awareness that theirs is a singular take on the times, not a definitive one, and one written as history continues to unfold unpredictably.

While novels that attempt to anatomise contemporary politics can have a built-in obsolescence, it’s surprising how many survive and are treated, by later generations, as definitive accounts of their times. One thinks of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, or Dickens’ Hard Times. The Social Problem novels of the 19th century, such as Disraeli’s Sybil or Gaskell’s North and South tell us as much about the ‘Two Nations’ of 1850s England as the Blue Books. In the 20th century, one could point to novels such as 1984 or Sinclair Lewis’s It Couldn’t Happen Here, both of which perform a similar function. Certainly, works of imagination are as valuable to an understanding of the times as the works of Carlyle and JS Mill in the 19th century, or Keynes and Bertrand Russell in the 20th.

Yet, a decade on from the EU referendum, it is surprising how few contemporary works of literature are nakedly political. Given that Brexit’s outcome will affect the UK for generations to come, there is a paucity of literary fiction (though much non-fiction) concerning the challenges faced by the country. While there may be extrinsic reasons for this (the slow pace of publishing, the current risk-averse publishing climate, and the general reluctance of novelists to write politically or polemically), substantial novels on the rise of the global far-right, European Nationalism, and the ultra-conservative Trump administration are thin on the ground.

In the months after the 2016 referendum, the most often cited literary reflections on Brexit were Ali Smith’s novels Autumn and Winter, and Sam Byers’ post-Brexit novel, Perfidious Albion. Alex Preston, writing about literature’s response to the crisis for the Economist, suggested that many novels ‘refer to it only subliminally, maybe even subconsciously, rather than placing the campaign and its aftermath in the foreground’. Certainly, Jonathan Coe’s much-trumpeted Middle England felt as much an exploration of the English character as of the hard political decisions facing the UK following the vote to leave the EU. The best example of ‘rapid-response’ Brexit literature was Anthony Cartwright’s novella The Cut, which was published by Peirene Press in 2017, exactly a year after the Referendum. Here, Cartwright deftly pits a middle-class London documentary-maker against a Black Country ex-boxer in order to show how we really have become a divided nation.

But can political fiction make any kind of difference? New Historicist theories maintain that artistic works can also affect the times in which they produced, as well as reflecting them – a well-known example is Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, which was instrumental in precipitating educational reform. So the answer is yes. But the pitfalls of setting out with this objective are numerous. The challenge for any novelist is to avoid writing polemically or didactically (as Tolstoy did in his later works). The aim should be to present each ideological stance neutrally, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions. Ultimately, the best works of art ask more questions than they answer.

David Grossman said it was our job as writers to be ‘witnesses: active, curious witnesses’ to world events. With 2026 and the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum looming, it seems there is more than ever to bear witness to. Trump version 2.0. Palestine. The fiasco of Westminster politics. The rise of the Reform UK party and the very real threat of a Farage government in 2019. We can only hope novelists rise to the challenge, and that The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction will continue to honour those who do

.

In Deliver Me from Nowhere, Scott Cooper’s sombre portrait of Nebraska-era Springsteen, there’s a moment where Jeremy Allen White (superbly owning the role of The Boss), hits on the first words for album’s title song after watching Terence Malik’s Badlands on TV and reading about the 1950s teenage serial killer Charles Starkweather. He sits on his sofa, Gibson acoustic cradled in his lap, furiously writing lyrics in marker pen; the archetypal moment of creation which might never have happened, but which most music biopic directors can’t resist. A similar (though bathetic) Michelangelo Moment - where the hand of God touches the earthly aspiring Adam - occurs in the Elton John biopic, Rocket Man, when the pyjama-clad Reg Dwight finds the chords for ‘Your Song’ on his parents’ old upright piano. And another in the Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, where Rami Malik’s preening Freddie Mercury conjures up ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ in his manager’s office after a band argument. Even more bathetically, the Brian May character comments: ‘That’s quite a cool riff, actually.’

And it’s not just music biopics. In Jane Campion’s Bright Star - possibly the greatest film ever made about a writer’s life - we see Ben Wishaw’s Keats composing the movie’s eponymous sonnet under a blossoming cherry tree. In Frida, the Frida Kahlo biopic, we see the great Mexican artist paint The Two Fridas in the midst of her divorce from Diego Rivera.

And so on.

It’s very rare the cameras are rolling for a real moment of divine inspiration. A singular example happens in Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary Get Back, where Paul McCartney slumps into work in a yellow pullover and starts strumming chords on his Hohner violin bass, while vocalising a pale imitation of Canned Heat’s ‘Going up the Country’ (a hit the previous summer), until he has the first verses of the film’s title song. It’s an electrifying moment, one in which all the shaky alchemy and indefinable magic of the creative act are conjured, or channelled, in a cold film studio at nine in the morning. It’s Ringo who delivers the most bathetic line of all (in real life, don’t forget): ‘He’s been playing that bass guitar again.’

***

It’s been over twenty years since I last wrote a song. For a long time, it was all I did, when fiction and poetry proved elusive in my twenties. For my old band Flamingoes’ first album Plastic Jewels (1995), my co-writer and I (my twin brother) wrote over 350 songs from the age of sixteen onwards. From this, we whittled it down to twelve for the final selection. Maybe they were the wrong choices (we didn’t make Top of the Pops), but it’s significant that I can remember where I was when each of the songs of mine which did make the cut were written.

One, which became our first single, arrived as I was playing along to (shamefully) Aerosmith in the office of the rehearsal and recording studio where I was a keyholder. At the end of my shift, I cycled home furiously and finished the song off on my 12-string acoustic until I’d completed it in the small hours of the morning. I still have the guitar, which is now sadly unplayable as its bridge has lifted off and its headstock is snapped beyond repair. But I can’t bring myself to throw it into the recycling skip as I feel it still holds some ineffable power of creativity in its rusted strings.

Novels don’t arrive in the manner of a coup de foudre. Rather, they gestate and grow organically from an initial seed, often over years or even decades, until you can’t recall the original moment of conception. John Lennon’s advice to George Harrison for songwriting success was to always finish the song off on the same day as inspiration strikes. For obvious reasons, this method doesn’t work with a novel. Although, for me, it often did for a poem, or a short story. There’s nothing like riding the wave of your own imagined brilliance and resourcefulness at midnight, convinced that you’re creating a masterpiece. The morning after often reveals something quite different.

Hanif Kureishi, in his remarkable essay ‘Something Given: Reflections on Writing’, said that writing needs ‘the regularity of work and the inspiration and pleasure of play’. It’s a hard balance to strike. Often, the novelist at her desk, stuck in the doldrums of writer’s block, feels like she’s chasing a sneeze, so tantalising is the promised breakthrough. In Ted Hughes’ poem, ‘The Thought-Fox’, the speaker’s apprehension of the moment of creation is famously likened to a fox sneaking into his garden. The speaker contemplates the blank page until, ‘with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox’, inspiration ‘enters the dark hole of the head’. Only then can the page be ‘printed’.

***

Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Mrs Darwin’ suggests, some great creative breakthroughs are the work of another person altogether. As Mrs Darwin wanders the zoo with her husband, Charles, a number of years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, she casually tells him: ‘Something about that Chimpanzee over there/ reminds me of you.’

The most compelling Michelangelo Moment in a recent biopic arrives in James Mangold’s Dylan film A Complete Unknown. Here, a shirtless Dylan (Timothee Chalamet) fingerpicks a pattern on his acoustic guitar, sitting on an unmade bed, while a righteously stroppy Baez (the excellent Monica Barbaro) makes him his morning coffee.

‘Now these chords I learnt from a cowboy named Wiggleford,’ Dylan says, (or rather Chalamet does, in his approximation of Dylan’s inimitable drawl).

‘You were in a carnival?’ Baez asks, unconvinced.

Not getting any reply (by now realising her new lover has been ‘reinventing’ himself since the moment they met), she adds: ‘You’re so completely full of shit.’

Then, after Dylan tells her she ‘tries too hard’ to write songs, she deadpans satisfyingly: ‘You’re kind of an asshole, Bob.’

Throwing a set of lyrics onto the bed, she demands: ‘Play this.’

Moments later, Dylan is singing his most famous song, ‘Blowing in the Wind’, with all the verses in the right order. An immaculate conception, it seems.

Or is it?

Did Baez do a Mrs Darwin on Bob? The film doesn’t decide either way. As Baez harmonises on the choruses, they both seem to be reading the words from the pages on the bed. Or maybe Bob had the song already, and Baez was very good at picking up a tune. Either way, it’s a delicious suggestion that Dylan really was a bit of a chancer, as well as the songwriting genius who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature many decades later.

What’s wrong with these two sentences?

I am writing a novel set in America.

I have never been to America.

Pretty much everything, you might say. And you wouldn’t just be reiterating the tired Creative Writing injunction to write what you know. North America, as more than one commentator has observed, is more like a world than a country. The sheer scale of its landscape, its teeming cities, its multitudinous diversity, its kaleidoscopic culture, is daunting. The USA is heterogenous in the extreme. Certainly, it’s more challenging for a British writer to set a contemporary novel there than, say, Croydon. And particularly now, with the political turmoil of Trump’s second term, and the socio-economic divides that are becoming gaping chasms. The USA is more of a moving target than ever. It’s not somewhere you would choose to stage a novel, with its delicate balance of external conflict and intense interiority. Not unless you knew the territory back to front.

And yet a number of famous novels and plays have been set in locations the author had never visited. For centuries, writers have been fooling us into believing they knew a place inside out while never leaving their desk. Did Shakespeare ever travel to Italy, for instance, to gain the background for Romeo and Juliet or The Merchant of Venice? It’s doubtful. He made too many geographical errors for a start, famously separating Milan and Verona by water in Two Gentleman of Verona. Defoe might have never travelled further than Lisbon, but he convinced us Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked on a desert island. Saul Bellow set Henderson the Rain King in a fictionalised version of Africa, though he’d never visited the continent. His worst novel, you might say (and I would agree), but that’s perhaps not the point. He didn’t do the in-the-field research (relying, instead, on National Geographic magazine), but somehow got away with it, at least as far as his indulgent critics of the 1950s were concerned.

Maybe there are places we just feel we’ve been to already, so relentless has our exposure to them been. I’ve been absorbing - or hungrily imbibing might be a better description - American culture for as long I can remember. The first cartoons I loved as a child (apart from the French-originated Magic Roundabout and the deeply English Bagpuss) were American. Zonked out on the living-room scatter cushions after school with my brother, catatonic before our new Rediffusion colour TV, we would devour The Wacky Races, Hong Kong Phooey and Scooby Doo. Later, we would gulp down the gritty New York streets of Starsky and Hutch with their iconic steam-blowing manholes and grimy yellow cabs. Similarly, the lush LA pools and mansions of Charlie’s Angels, or the dusty Californian valleys of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Later still, the swampy Deep South of The Dukes of Hazard and the Boston barflies of Cheers.

When we were old enough to go to the Stevenage ABC and see films unchaperoned, another America opened up for us, though the certificates of most of these prohibited entry. In 1978, two of the biggest movies (and ones we were too young to see) were Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. De Niro’s inscrutable, bearded face was never off the cover of our issues of Film Review and Photoplay, with dramatic pictures inside of him in his vigorous prime, aiming his hunting rifle; or Christopher Walken with a pistol to his sweating head surrounded by jeering Vietnamese dicers. Why the film was called The Deer Hunter, we were never sure as we doubted there were many deer in Saigon. It was clear these films were necessary for America to salve the collective trauma and guilt of the war. The following year, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was similarly everywhere. By this time, my brother and I were obsessed with American movies and were collecting anything connected with them, knocking on the door of the ABC’s box office and begging for posters once a film’s run was over. One of these was Apocalypse Now, and we coveted the haunting image of the choppers on the dawn raid, superimposed over Brando’s Easter Island face, all refracted through a fug of Agent Orange

Of course, Saturday Night Fever was another forbidden film, though the closest we got to it was the soundtrack album and the poster mag, which unfolded to reveal a tableau of Travolta in his creamy flares preening on the flashing chequerboard dancefloor under the eternal mirrorball. The one American film we were allowed to see was Grease, with Travolta reprising his role as the archetypal priapic young man. Grease, I’m ashamed to say, was a blast from start to finish. There was something about the sheer glossiness of the technicolour, its unstoppable esprit and bravado, that shook me up. The ‘Greased Lightning’ dance workout in the auto-spares workshop was as glamorous and high-energy as any of the Gene Kelly musicals our mother liked to watch on rainy afternoons. I came out of the movie thinking: so this was adolescence, then. This is what comes next. After the peaceful idyll of childhood we were all destined to go girl or boy-crazy, losing our minds while dancing around in black spandex pants and leather jackets. I wasn’t sure I was looking forward to it. Moreover, it was an American adolescence that was on show, with diners, open-top Cadillacs and prom queens. I wasn’t convinced this was what a Hertfordshire smalltown adolescence would deliver, and I would be proved correct.

The 1990s witnessed a second Renaissance of American movies that seemed to pick up the adventurous, irreverent spirit the 70s. The less said of the intervening years the better. By 1980, the whole edifice of high-water mark Americana – of beautifully made films such as Five Easy Pieces, Badlands, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Manhattan – would crumble to be replaced with the likes of Ghostbusters and the A-Team; tawdry trash that anticipated a new, racially intolerant, religiously righteous America whose legacy is still visible today in Trump and MAGA and a myriad contemporary ills. But the 90s saw startling films from emerging directors such as Todd Solondz, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Spike Lee, the Coen Brothers and David Fincher. All very male, and it was a very male America on show, with only the action movies of Kathryn Bigelow, and Sofia Coppola’s debut The Virgin Suicides, making a real impact when it came to female directors. Scorsese, long a chronicler of America’s underbelly hit another winning streak with Casino and Cape Fear, period films which both felt fresh and edgy at the time. Yet another fresh cinematic take on the USA was provided by movies directed by non-American directors, such as Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas and Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise, both of which depict a panoramic America, obsessed with its own iconography and scale; its potential for limitless freedom, or its flipside, getting lost.

Despite this lifelong immersion in a culture that seems tantalisingly familiar, researching a novel on a country I’ve never visited has proved hard going. As with the versions of America discovered by Wenders and Scott, the non-fiction I’ve found most fruitful are two books written by outsiders. Both are essentially road-trip narratives. The first, chronologically speaking, is Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day by Day, written in 1947 and beautifully translated by Carol Cosman, and recently reissued by Penguin. De Beauvoir’s account of her encounter with a post-war United States is scintillatingly vivid. Beginning in New York, she’s simultaneously drawn to, and repelled by, America’s vulgar superabundance, its vigour; its lack of Old Europe’s restraint, refinement and manners. Douglas Brinkley, in his introduction, observes that De Beauvoir has ‘uncanny eyes for the shallow extravagance of American culture and an abolitionist’s rage at the evil of segregation south of the Mason-Dixon line’.

The second book is a contemporary account of a woman’s odyssey across the States. Joanna Pocock, in Greyhound (published by Fitzcarraldo in August 2025) embarks on her journey almost two decades after her first, which followed a miscarriage. Beginning in her native Canada, Pocock brings a novelist’s skill to on-the-road encounters. Naming De Beauvoir’s book as one of ‘only three accounts of women undertaking the Great American Road Trip’, she observes that in male versions of the same sea-to-shining-sea journey, ‘there are fewer conversations with strangers, the individual is paramount, and the car is a symbol of intoxicating, virile freedom’. The worst offender here, she suggests, is Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, written in 1960; a travelogue which follows the world-famous novelist across the USA with his French poodle, Charley.

A valid criticism perhaps. Yet, when I finally read Steinbeck’s book, I was surprised to find the venerated, booze-addled middle-aged author undertook the trip precisely because he felt like an outsider in his own country. In a letter to Frank Loesser, he professes that he seeks ‘re-knowledge of my own country, of its speeches, its views, its attitudes, and its changes’. What he discovers is that America’s desire for ‘more material toys’ has resulted in boredom: ‘The nation has become a discontented land’.

My only conclusion is that, if America’s great chronicler - the writer of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, no less - can find himself a stranger in a strange land, maybe a novel written by someone who’s never been there can provide an insight into the mythical Land of the Free. It will certainly be more exciting than writing about Croydon.

In Brian Dillon’s essay ‘Sensibility as Structure’, he reveals the back pages of his forty-five notebooks - stretching back some twenty-five years - contain many sentences he scribbled down in admiration, by writers such as John Ruskin, DH Lawrence and Walters Pater and Benjamin. Admitting sheepishly that these authors are mostly ‘dismayingly male’, he also states he finds it hard to paraphrase, or even formally express, why he chose to write down one sentence rather than another, equally striking sentence, or how to say, ‘because this must be the word, what I love there’.

It’s a question I ask often myself when reading for pleasure, or assessing my students’ work, or, just lately (wearing my other hat as a publisher) going through the 1,500 submissions to my fledgling small press, Conduit Books. Well, what do I love there? In all honesty, the question is more frequently, what don’t I love there? This seems easier to answer. Sloppy thinking. Pretensiousness. Imprecise language. Incoherence. A tin ear. Outright incompetence. Cliché. And that deal-breaker: the talent to create irritation or a sense of boredom in the reader. Putting aside reading for pleasure (which axiomatically states you are not being irritated or bored), it’s surprising how few unpublished writers can pen a compelling, beautifully structured sentence, let alone paragraph. What made them think a potential reader would fork over their twenty bucks for that? Do they imagine people pay to be bored, confused, annoyed? If precipitating literary pleasure is the supreme value, then surely they should be aiming to provide it all times. No?

Of course, a writer doesn’t have to be a ‘stylist’ (a phrase which always puts me in mind of an author holding a pair of crimping tongs in one hand, scissors in the other) to provide literary pleasure or pin the reader to the page. Take Austen, for example. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife. Whole undergrad dissertations have undoubtedly been written about this famous opening line, arguing over its relative merits, but for me it hits the mark every time I read it. Was there ever a better first sentence to a novel? One that sets out situation, voice and character in a single elegant statement? Woolf said Austen was the hardest writer to ‘catch in the act of greatness’, but the first line of Pride and Prejudice proves her wrong. The brilliance of this unshowy sentence (whose alliteration in ‘want of a wife’ points tantalisingly towards ‘style’ without quite achieving it) is down to its bluntness. There’s a strong opinion here that begs one to differ with it, to argue with it belligerently. It’s the thought that is elegant and stimulating, rather than the syntax or word choice. An adherent of Pynchon or post-modern tricksiness might find themselves yawning at Austen, and this is only correct. She’s not for them, and no amount of bonnets or BBC heritage porn will ever convince them otherwise. Jeanette Winterson, in her essay ‘Art Objects’, suggests ‘it is impossible to legislate taste, and if it were possible, it would be repugnant’. Beyond what can be empirically tested (the imprecision, the tin ear, et cetera), there is mere subjectivity, which, like Larkin’s ‘deep blue air’, is nothing, and is nowhere and is endless.

What Dillon doesn’t take account of is that we can easily fall out of love. Reading an author, or a novel, for the first time that we respond strongly to (cerebrally, emotionally, aesthetically) can feel very much like falling in love. The sense of upheaval is exciting, sometimes even terrifying. It breaks down our preconceived notions, makes us see ourselves and our place in the world afresh. But love alters over the years. While I’m sure I will always love Austen (and it took many tries until I finally found Mansfield Park in order to fully commit), I’m not so sure about other writers. Sometimes I pass their long-neglected spines on my shelves and have to resist the urge to go back and sample them again. Might they have been, as TS Eliot says of Shelley, merely companions of youth? Would I cringe at their sentences if I read them again, just as one might shudder to revisit an old love affair without the rose-coloured spectacles? There are favourite novels I haven’t read since I was a teenager. The Bell Jar. The Catcher in the Rye. Les Enfants Terribles. If I went back to them, would I find them pretentious, jejune, unreadable? Hanif Kureishi said the worst thing you could do is re-read On the Road again at the age of 37. And if we do find we’ve fallen out of love with those early literary paramours, can we take the concomitant feeling of faithlessness? And would it merely say more about our limitations as consumers of art rather than the art itself?

For most of my students, the benchmark of whether they fall in love with a work of literature is if they can ‘relate’ to it. Only if it speaks to their own experience can they admit it to their hearts. I often suggest that they should go to fiction for the opposite reasons: that it opens up new fields of experience, new worlds, new cultures. But I fear the damage has been done by the online world of liking posts on platforms that mirror their own opinions back to them, of groupthink and cultural narrowmindedness.

Suggesting that my students should leave their comfort zones is not the same as the notion that the difficult or challenging is somehow good for them; that it’s more virtuous or nutritious than the familiar, or that it’s somehow character building. If they find nothing stimulating in the new and the strange maybe it’s legitimate to say it’s just bad art. Perhaps it’s not saying anything about their failure to comprehend or enjoy. It might be the art that’s at fault. It might be the case that the work commits the ultimate sin of failing to communicate

What’s always fruitful, during my seminar on the novel, is to go back every year and find new things to love in passages I feared might have evaporated into invisibility due to their over-familiarity. The opening of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, for instance, with its ‘large, proud, rose-coloured hotel’ where the action of the novel is to take place, and the ‘deferential palms’ which cool its ‘flushed facade’. Or Virginia Woolf’s evocation of Pointz Hall in Between the Acts, with its glass case containing ‘a watch which had stopped a bullet on the fields of Waterloo’. Or, to choose two (as yet) non-canonical writers, Eley Williams’ description of a letter K like ‘the point of an arrow smacking into a trunk’ in her story ‘The Alphabet’; or Sally Rooney’s unforgettable evocation, in Conversations with Friends’ great dinner party scene, of a disappointed glance ‘which contracted and fell like a piece of wire spring’.

All of which reminds me that returning to the familiar will always provide more than enough to love there, and that some literary love affairs have the potential to last forever.

I like to think I'll always have Paris, despite not visiting the city that much and only speaking patchy boulangerie French.

Unlike Nick Newman – the narrator of my second novel, Jacob’s Advice (2020), whose father took him to Paris every year – the city has never really been ‘in my blood’. Yet, I still feel a deep connection to (or maybe a nostalgia for) La Ville Lumière, one that has deepened over the years. My own father lived and worked in Paris for fifteen years after he separated from my mother, and my twin brother and I visited him for a couple of magical Easter breaks in a row – in 1977, and 1978. We were nine, going on ten, so the city made a huge impression. I’ve been back many times over the years: on an Interrail trip aged 18; then with various girlfriends; and once with the band I formed with my brother. In 1995, we were on a European tour with Echobelly and were scheduled to play the Erotika club in Montmartre, but transport difficulties meant we missed the gig. We ended up staying for a couple of days; busking outside the Pompidou Centre and writing songs in the hotel room. It was a memorable visit, yet never quite so magical as those first boyhood experiences.

My father worked in Montparnasse, in Denfert-Rochereau, so that became our stamping ground, with its distinctive lion on a pedestal and the Catacombs under our feet. He was a translator of computer software from English to French – this was apparently a big thing in the 70s, as a lot of software was developed in the States. Our Easter visits were incredibly vivid because, at that age, you’re very porous to everything: the smell of crêpes beurre-sucre on the street; the kiosks selling Le Figaro and Le Monde; the crumbly feel of a fresh croissant in the café on the corner.

My father’s first proper apartment was opposite Marie Curie’s old place in the Paris suburb of Sceaux, with a plaque marking her stay visible from the balcony. At night, I remember the sound of dogs barking endlessly; the sweep of the distinctive yellow French car headlights over the ceiling. When he wasn’t working, my father took us to see the sights: the Eiffel Tour; Invalides, with Napoleon’s monumental sarcophagus; the melting ice cream towers of the Sacré-Cœur. He even managed to lose us in the forest surrounding Fontainebleau, a misadventure our mother never found out about. One night, he drove us to the rue Voltaire to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the V.O. – the Version Originale, with French subtitles. It was an immensely exciting experience. As was walking the Champs Élysées at night, with its sparkling cafes and windows full of haute couture; the implacable arch with its flame to the unknown soldier dominating the nocturnal cityscape.

In retrospect, our visits were probably arranged to allow our mother to spend time with our dastardly stepfather, whose company we were glad to be relieved of for a fortnight at a time. I remember our father being at work on many days; us stuck in the flat, bored and restless. Not very responsible – but that was the 1970s. We would spend our days in the flat reading or making scrapbooks into which we stuck our metro tickets, Paris postcards and, once, the foil wrapper of a big chocolate Easter chicken. To this day, the taste of French chocolate has the same effect on me as Proust’s madeleine. As does the crystalline opening arpeggios of Tubular Bells, the only cassette in my father’s Phillips tape recorder. Ditto his only meal, a basic bachelor concoction you might generously call pasta al burro, though without any basil and too much salt.

When I finally made it over to Paris during the writing of Jacob’s Advice, I made sure I only travelled there when the novel was two-thirds complete. The weight of all the words that had been written about the city before – by Hemingway, Colette, Fitzgerald, Hugo, Balzac, Jean Rhys, the list goes on – was too paralysing to contemplate earlier. The research trip took a single chilly November day, and had the effect of suddenly bringing the book and its characters to life. Lines from my novel-in-progress jumped out at me on every corner. It was intensely exciting to flâner around the city in the footsteps of narrator Nick and his cousin Larry (the focus of the novel, and a man on a quest to find his possible Jewish ancestry). I spent hours wandering the leaf-strewn paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg, where Nick meditates on his health issues, his estranged wife, and beloved son back in London. It was here I found the ‘fat busts’ of Flaubert and Stendhal, as well as the supine statue of Galatea, which Nick calls the ‘sexiest sculpture in the world’.

I made a trip to the tiny, secretive parc Paul Painlevé, opposite the north door of the Sorbonne, where Nick comes every day before work to contemplate the statue of Montaigne, with its polished right foot, and the ubiquitous ‘mysterious resting men in sunglasses’. I crossed the Pont Neuf, walked along the rue de Rivoli and into the Marais, and so to the palatial Places des Vosges with its tumbling fountains, where Larry lives in high style with his girlfriend, Ariel, and her parents. I then went to the rue des Rosiers at the heart of the Jewish Quarter for a lunch of falafel and chickpea pitta at Chez Hanna, where Nick, Larry and Ariel meet to talk about the mystery of their ancestors.

Finally, I found my way back to the boulevard Saint-Michel, where Nick stands on his balcony and watches the sun ‘rise over the place Edmond Rostand like a slice of molten peach’. I went for a quick drink in Le Pantalon on the rue Royer-Collard, Nick’s local bar, one of those dark dives that accepts only cash, and where the Pernod drunks still prop up the bar all day. Then I walked south and found myself back at place Denfert-Rochereau’s famous lion on its pedestal. Here Nick contemplates the ‘underworld kingdom’ of the Catacombs below his feet – ‘those other streets of femurs and skulls’.

And it's here where I sat outside a bustling café with un demi in the hour before the train; remembering those boyhood visits with my brother, which suddenly seemed so eternally vivid in the memory. Maybe I will always have Paris after all.

This essay was first published online in 2020 in The Literary Sofa

The week my brother and I returned for our last year at primary school, ITV screened On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

For once, I had the smug advantage of having read the book first, and it immediately became my favourite Bond film, tying in first place with The Spy Who Loved Me. It’s still hard to choose between them to this day.

Flaked out on the scatter cushions with our customary choc-ices, a feline purring on each of us (James cradling our new ginger kitten), we watched OHMSS with a kind of tranced astonishment. It was a scintillating trip, as fresh and crisp and unexpected as the Alpine slopes Bond skis down, pursued by Blofeld’s relentless orange-and-black-clad henchmen. Its opening sequence, with Bond tearing down a coastal road in Portugal at sunrise, was uniquely gripping. There was something strange about the light conditions; the sky pearlescent and brooding. Though we had no idea at the time, this weird, lurid lighting was the result of using a ‘day-for-night’ filming technique, by which night scenes are shot in the day, with all the tone and contrast reduced in the edit to make it resemble dusk or dawn. Often hilariously artificial – like back-projection, which was used to for some of the ski chases later in the film – it was curiously apt here. It adds to the sense of menace and strangeness, of time being out of joint. What Bond discovers when he skids to halt in his sleek new Aston Martin is a woman trying to commit suicide in the relentless surf of the Atlantic Ocean. I felt happy to have identified the woman at once as Tracy from the book, but I still didn’t know whether she was going to make it in the film version. She’s dressed in a sparkly, other-worldly 60s evening dress, a sylph committing herself to the waves. Bond being Bond, he rescues her in style, only to be set upon by goons for the most frenetic fight I’d ever seen. Tracy escapes in her open-topped crimson Cougar, only for Bond (played by an actor who resembles Sean Connery, but who we know isn’t) to mutter: ‘This never happened to the other fella…’

It’s a stunning opening, one that ends on a self-referential note which went over our heads. This note is sounded again during the credits, with an hourglass sifting images of Bond’s finest celluloid moments to date. Honeychile Rider rising from the waves. Bond battling Red Grant in the train carriage. Bond on the Bahaman beach in Thunderball. These knowing nods to the past are sustained when Bond hands in his resignation after being taken off Blofeld’s trail by M. Emptying his desk, he takes out Honey’s knife-belt; the watch with its cheese-cutter used to despatch Red Grant; the mini oxygen-tank from Thunderball; each action prompting a musical cue from the appropriate John Barry score. For us, there was something satisfying about this, as by this point we knew where most of these talismanic objects originated (though it was obviously a ploy by the producers to indicate the film would have some continuity with its predecessors, despite the Sean Connery Who Wasn’t Sean Connery). We were beginning to know our Bond, and it felt good.

And perhaps the film drew us in like no other because it’s all about the girl. Bond’s mission is saving the girl, often from herself. As with The Spy Who Loved Me, this is the real plot we follow. Contessa di Teresa Vicenzo (played with labile brilliance by Diana Rigg) is a jaded socialite who hates her controlling father. Her father happens to be Marc-Ange Draco, head of the Unione Corse Crime Syndicate. When Bond falls for Tracy, he discovers Draco has information about the whereabouts of Blofeld, leading him to Switzerland, after a brief visit to the Royal College of Arms. It turns out that Blofeld is holed up in the Swiss Alps attempting to prove he’s a bonafide Count – a descendant of the ludicrously named Count Balthazar de Bleauchamp – while publicly running an allergy clinic. This is a front for a laboratory that’s developing deadly poisons. These will be used to threaten global destruction after Blofeld trains a group of young women – his Angels of Death – to distribute the venom unless his blackmail demands are met. The weaving of the two plots is masterly, and Richard Maibaum’s script reinstates Bond’s customary quips, something missing after Roald Dahl’s amateurish and po-faced screenplay for You Only Live Twice.

Just about every scene of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is memorable and perfectly executed. There’s Bond’s romantic progress through a sun-flooded Portugal, wooing Tracy as Louis Armstrong sings the immortal ‘We Have All the Time in the World’. There’s the tense episode in Gumboldt’s Swiss office where Bond breaks into a safe (using his only gadget in the film). There’s the soaring, Barry-soundtracked helicopter ride to Blofled’s gleaming mountain hideaway, Piz Gloria. Then the first meeting with the Angels of Death, where Bond strides in wearing a kilt to meet the missing contestants from the 1969 Miss World competition. Then the moment one of them lipsticks her room number on his bare thigh. This is followed by Bond’s daring escape in the cable car hut. The night ski chase that ends with an assailant plunging into a gorge thousands of feet below. The stock car race and Bond’s proposal to Tracy in the barn. Their escape in the morning over stretches of dazzling snow, only for Tracy to be lost in an avalanche. And the dawn raid on Piz Gloria, with an armada of helicopters, led by Draco’s troops posing as a ‘humanitarian mission’; the sunrise bleeding beauty over the Alps. And lastly, Bond’s exuberant, slightly hippy wedding, followed with horrible swiftness by Tracy’s cold-blooded murder; Blofeld’s car speeding past while henchwoman Irma Bunt sprays the windshield with machine-gun fire. They had all the time in the world. Until they didn’t.

We finished the film exhilarated, stimulated, more alive. But another emotion was in the mix, too; a first for a Bond film. We were moved. Heartbroken by the way life could provide joy one moment, only to bring tragedy the next. Another reversal, but this time a grown-up one. A lesson. It seemed to reinforce our growing awareness that love was always doomed to go wrong in the end, one way or another.

Along with its late 60s glamour, its nods to the counterculture (the poster promised Far Up! Far Out! Far More!) and a post-war society undergoing rapid change, there’s something regal about OMHSS. Something ineffably noble. Also something pure and super-distilled. It’s hard to quantify – and John Barry’s heraldic, ever-descending fanfare of a theme tune certainly helped – but maybe this cohesive effect is due to the fact that, by the end of the 60s, the Bond team had become a crack fighting unit. After five films, their wealth of expertise had been honed to perfection. There was production designer Syd Cain, who had worked on Dr No and From Russia with Love. Director Peter Hunt, who had edited four out of the five Bonds so far. Stunt coordinator extraordinaire Bob Simmons. Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell and Desmond Llewelyn returning as M, Moneypenny and Q respectively for the sixth time. And John Barry, of course, fresh from winning an Oscar for A Lion in Winter, also back for his sixth James Bond film, producing music of such piercing beauty and grandeur that his soundtrack stands as his highest achievement.

The only missing link in the chain was, of course, Sean Connery. Bored with Bond after You Only Live Twice, Connery had handed in his notice, tasking Broccoli and Saltzman with the impossible job of finding a replacement. After screen-testing over four hundred actors, they chose an Australian male model who had made a suave, suited-and-booted impression in a Fry’s chocolate commercial. It wasn’t that George Lazenby was a poor actor, he wasn’t an actor. We’ll come back to the quality of his performance, and how it affected the film, later.

So the producers were taking risks, as well as using a tried-and-trusted team of seasoned professionals. And maybe this added to the freshness and daring of the film. An actor who’d never acted. And a director (in the shape of Peter Hunt) who’d never directed. To prop up this lack of experience, some very seasoned and excellent actors were hired. For Tracy, it was clear they couldn’t cast a European actress of limited range and then dub her, as they had done with both Daniella Bianchi in From Russia with Love and Claudine Auger in Thunderball. Diana Rigg was a formidable stage actor, and had honed her action chops as Emma Peel in The Avengers. A perfect fit. For Draco, they chose veteran Italian actor Gabrielle Ferzetti, who brought a smooth garrulous charm to the role. And for Blofeld, they eschewed Donald Pleasance’s rather mannered turn in the previous film and cast Telly Savalas, with his New York savvy and subtle force. Another perfect fit. The scene where Tracy and Blofeld exchange lines from Yeats and James Elroy Flecker in the Alpine Room, as a distraction from the imminent onslaught of Draco’s helicopters, is beautifully played by both Rigg and Savalas, and beyond the scope of many of the actors Cubby and his team had hired previously to play the Bond Girl and Bond Villain. Finally, there’s Michael Reed’s pin-sharp cinematography coupled with John Glen’s pacy editing, both of which contributed to making the film so sumptuous and kinetic. Glen, who went on to direct the pre-credit parachute-jump stunt in The Spy Who Loved Me, and further Moore Bonds, was initially presented with a rough assembly of over three hours. That he cut this down to the tight action movie that has since become one of the most beloved Bond films is nothing short of miraculous. There’s something enormously accomplished and confident about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. At its best, it presents a perfect symbiosis of image and music: cinema at its peak.

However, not everyone thought so at the time of the film’s release. While the ensuing years have revealed OHMSS as the pinnacle of the Bond franchise, the first reviews were lousy. In 1970, America’s oldest movie magazine Film in Review pronounced it: ‘Plotless…meaningless… beneath contempt’. Two decades later, in 1992, they revised this opinion, commenting: ‘A perfect movie and the crowning achievement of the series’. Lazenby, in particular, came in for much flak, mainly for not being Sean Connery. This has always puzzled me. When I first watched the film as an open-mouthed ten-year-old, Lazenby was perfectly convincing as James Bond. This is not an opinion that time has revised. He was Bond, through and through, from the moment he appears in his ruffed shirt to the last scene where he cradles the dead Tracy in his arms; a chance to do ‘some proper acting’, as the reviews of the time sneered.

But what is proper acting when it comes to a screen performance? Screen acting is much, much harder than it looks, something I came to realise when, years later, my brother and I both tried our hand at it (in a limited way, and mainly to earn some money in our lean thirties). With screen acting, every micro-expression, every movement has to ring true. Deal in false coin, and the audience won’t buy it for a second. Not only that, you have to do it at seven in the morning surrounded by fifty crew members with arc lights burning into your face. And not just once. You have to do it over and over again, with the same spontaneity. It’s hard, concentrated work, requiring a great deal of skill, subtlety and nuance. Then there’s the problem of the continuity of a performance. Unlike a play, which gives an actor a linear opportunity to build a convincing portrayal of character, a film is shot out of sequence. It always struck me as apt that Connery’s delivery of his immortal lines, ‘My Name is Bond, James Bond,’ as he lights his Moreland cigarette in the casino, was shot three months after filming commenced on Dr No. This is the first time Bond ever has been seen on screen, and Connery knocks it out of the park. If it had been shot on day one of filming, it’s unlikely he would have been able to muster the nonchalance, the suave confidence required. Connery had been playing the role of 007 for months and knew just how much spin to give it. Not only that, but he was an experienced screen actor by this point in his career.

Which makes Lazenby’s first-ever performance on screen all the more remarkable. While he certainly looks the part in a tux or a tight sky-blue ski suit, he also seems to spiritually inhabit the role in a way many of the fine actors who later played Bond (such as Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan) never quite manage. Lazenby is never wooden. Every reaction shot rings true. He’s a natural. Every softening of the eyes, every charming dimpled smile, every hardening of the brow as he gets ready to go into action, is on the money. Plus, as a physical actor, there are few who can surpass him as Bond. With no stage-combat training, Lazenby was throwing real punches. While this must have been hard on his fellow actors, there’s no doubt it added to the vérité. He brings a real sense of danger and athleticism to Bond. Watching the film again only reinforces the skill, subtlety and nuance Lazenby brings to the role. He excels at the emotional stuff, too. From his lovesick-suitor exchanges with Draco (‘You must give me the name of your oculist’), to his wonderfully effortless proposal to Tracy in the hayloft (‘Will you marry me?’), to his heartbroken reaction to seeing his bride of an hour dead (‘It’s okay, she’s only taking a rest. We have all the time in the world…’), Lazenby proves himself a resourceful, talented and watchable screen actor. It’s only a shame he turned down the offer to make further films. If OHMSS makes a real error, it’s in dubbing Lazenby for his scenes where Bond poses as Sir Hilary Bray from the Royal College of Arms. The voiceover provided by George Baker often verges on risible. As Mark O’ Connell comments in his 007 memoir Catching Bullets, the sequence where Bond works his way through the Angels of Death finds Lazenby suddenly ‘speaking like Noel Coward while acting like Sid James’.

O’ Connell also goes on to astutely distinguish between having one’s own personal ‘favourite’ Bond film and identifying the ‘best’ Bond film. After all these years, if put to the test, I would plump for The Spy Who Loved Me as my favourite Bond. But On Her Majesty’s Secret Service will always be the best.

Early on during my planning for Conduit Books - a new independent press announced last month that will initially publish male authors - I identified a fairly serious flaw in the scheme. The fact is, I don't like men very much. Or most men. While others might say the real flaw is 3000 years of patriarchal dominance which makes such a venture redundant from the start (and a few have said as much in the tsunami of reaction, while other voices have been more balanced, particularly in the Guardian), I did think seriously about abandoning the project.

Sure, I have a few close male friends, but by and large I prefer female company. Most men are emotionally closed and wearyingly competitive. I read more fiction by women than men, and review roughly as many books by women as men. My first literary heroes were heroines: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. Both the managers of Flamingoes, my 90s indie band, were women (at a time when this was a rarity), as were both my literary agents. I have more female friends than male, and those men who are friends are all big readers (particularly of women). What was I doing setting up a press that provided a space for a few more male authors to come through?

Yet I could see there were narratives addressing fatherhood, masculinity, working-class male experience and negotiating the 21st-century as a man that were simply not getting through to the tables of Waterstones and Foyles. I wanted to read these narratives. Of course, when it comes to non-fiction, men still dominate, and the recently launched Women's Prize for Non-Fiction is timely and much needed. But the imbalance between male and female authors of UK literary fiction (not in translation), outlined by the Sunday Times chief critic Johanna Thomas-Corr in her 2021 Observer piece is, by and large, still in full effect. As a novelist first and foremost myself, I was naturally exercised by the issue.

The fact is, there was never any dastardly plot to exclude men. The current situation is merely symptomatic of how the business has evolved over the last 15 years, and shouldn't be viewed as a 'problem' or something that needs fixing. There's a simple affinity bias at work here. With almost 80% of fiction commissioning editors being women, and with most London-based literary agents also being women, it's understandable they are looking for stories that resonate strongly with them. And so they should, for sound financial reasons. Unlike the more commercial end of the market, to publish literary fiction is often to put your job on the line. It had better sell, or be prize-nominated, or be critically well-received, or you might find yourself unemployed. Why risk publishing a male author whose work you admire but don't 'connect with' emotionally or intellectually?

As literary agent Emma Shercliff said in her response to the press's announcement on Radio 4's PM programme: 'Women are reading more and buying more... In the last few years there's definitely been a trend for us as an industry to look towards publishing for the women's market.' A cursory look at the Bookseller's weekly rights roundup will tell you most of the four-way-auctions, pre-empts and six-figure deals are not going to new male authors. Most of the recent heavily promoted literary bestsellers and works of debut literary fiction have been by women. The rights round-up also reveals the preponderance of the three-woman team, where the author, agent and editor will all be women. The all-women literary prize longlist or shortlist has become more common, for instance, the longlist for the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize in 2024, and the shortlist for the 2025 Encore award for a second novel. Given that 68% of the publishing workforce as a whole is female (stats Publishers Association 2024), the result is sometimes an imbalance in the diversity of what's available on the tables of Waterstones. Again, this shouldn't be seen as a negative thing. Women are enjoying a heyday in publishing; one that has been hard-won. But where does that leave, say, a young working-class male author from Glasgow who feels he might be left behind in the current climate?

Admittedly, the conversation about the dearth of new male authors is not a new one within publishing. A few years ago, there was a flurry of broadsheet pieces, one of which asked, Where Are the New Male Hotshot Novelists? For a while, there was a lively debate about whether publishing had overlooked young or new male writers. Four years later that conversation is no longer as prevalent, although it's probably even harder for male authors to break through now. For instance, in April 2025, the Bookseller's top-ten fiction picks for the month included no men whatsoever. In May, there were only two (and one was Irvine Welsh, who, while being good value, has been around for decades). What was most startling was the lack of comment on this, either in the Bookseller's editorial, or on social media. This, it seemed, was the new status quo.

Overall, the response to Conduit Books has been overwhelmingly positive and encouraging, with over 1000 submissions from around the world, and support from many formidable female novelists (and vocal feminists), as well as women working in publishing. There have been comment pieces in the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, the Independent, the i-paper, and Radio 4. Many small presses got in touch with messages of support, too. Sam Jordison of Galley Beggar articulated 'publishing's problem with men' brilliantly in a Substack piece posted before the press was announced. He later wrote an excellent companion piece about Conduit Books, voicing his support (and doubts, too). Jordison also points out that the issue of male writers intersects with class and race. He's not the first to observe that publishing is still, despite many diversity drives, predominantly white and middle-class.

Inevitably, there has been valid criticism, pushback and a small quantity of abuse, most of it on Bluesky (ironically the 'nice place'), and attempts to align Conduit Books with the toxic axis of Trump and Tate and the so-called manosphere. I've endeavoured to position the press as non-adversarial or militant, and certainly not anti-woke. I turned down a TV interview with GB News as I felt they might attempt to drag the press into the spurious culture wars debate, rather than addressing the issue of who is and who isn’t getting published right now.

Conduit Books doesn't have a political dimension. After three millennia of the patriarchy, no one is pretending men are hard done by or not represented in the Arts. Fifty-two years ago, the brilliant Virago began publishing books by women with the intention of addressing inequalities in the wider society, many of which are sadly still with us. But if there is a political issue to address, then it's the pressing problem of what young men read, especially given the current global political climate. One editor told me her teenage daughter has many potential literary heroines to choose from, while her son has no male role models who write. As well as reading books by women, I would rather young men read work by their literary hero than the internet. I have an eight-year-old son. I worry about what he will be reading in a few years' time.

Ultimately, Conduit Books was started in good faith, and I'm excited at the prospect of bringing some outstanding fiction and life writing into the world that might otherwise have been passed by. I hope we will make a difference. Who knows, it might even make me like men more.

This piece first appeared in The Bookseller in May 2025

When our father took me and my brother to Paris in the 1978 Easter holidays - during which we saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the Version Originale in a cavernous cinema on the rue Voltaire - our obsession with the James Bond films quickly broadened to include all movies and related memorabilia. We were ten years old, and ready for anything.

At the time, a renaissance of American filmmaking was in full swing, the fruits of which were travelling over the Atlantic to the Stevenage ABC with increasing frequency. Most of these films we were too young to see, but they were a tantalising prospect. The very adult nature of movies such as The Deer Hunter, Looking for Mr Goodbar, Kramer vs. Kramer, Apocalypse Now and Alien, was compelling. They provided a window on a world of grown-up conflict, fear and pleasure we were just beginning to understand. Along with Film Review, we began collecting Photoplay with its more in-depth interviews with stars and directors. The nearest we got to seeing these movies was the poster art, which we obsessed over. The late 70s also heralded a renaissance in film artwork, with unforgettable designs and taglines. Alien’s cracked egg, with its glow of otherworldly light, and the slogan In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream, was only one example. Rather than cut up the film mags and paste these posters into scrap books, we used to copy them line by line, lovingly rendering the United Artists or the Warner Brothers logos, along with the full casts and crews. Some of these production designers and directors of photography were more familiar to us than our own school friends. We also rendered the lettering of the London cinemas where these films were shown. The Screen on the Hill. The Ritzy. The Warner West End. We had no idea where these places were, but we knew how to draw their logos.

Our collection of movie merch grew exponentially. There were film tie-ins, annuals and postermags (a lavish 70s innovation you could find in Surridge’s, the newsagent on Hitchin's Hermitage Road). There were the Palitoy figures from Star Wars, a film we were by then desperate to see. There were bubble gum cards, and Corgi toys and lunch boxes and board games. But the hard stuff – the actual cinema posters and official promotional material the exhibitor was meant to return or destroy – was rarer, and much more expensive. We’d been sending off postal orders to addresses from the classifieds at the back of Film Review for over a year, and then sitting back expectantly before a Bond poster would arrive via Royal Mail. Then one day we came across an ad for a place called the Vintage Magazine Shop in Seven Dials near Covent Garden. Apparently, this was where you could find all these posters and mags for sale without having to wait for the postman. The next time our mother took us down to London on the train to go shopping, we made sure to pester her for a visit.

There was a special atmosphere to London in the late 70s, best described as seedy dilapidation. Years of industrial unrest and galloping stagflation had rendered the country, and its once great capital, broken and poor. Two smells will eternally evoke it for me: black cab diesel fumes and chicken chow mein. The streets of Chinatown, which we traversed to get to Leicester Square or the Charring Cross Road, were impossibly evocative with their waft of frying onions and soy sauce. Soho at the time was at peak depravity, with ‘adult’ shops on every corner and sex workers staggering drunk down the middle of the road. There was a real sense of lawless dissipation. Everywhere you went there were tatty facades and dirty old men in raincoats, or punks with sky-high spiky hair and safety pins in their ears. It’s fair to say we loved it all. Compared to Hitchin, with its toytown streets and manicured lawns, Soho felt like real life. London was jammed with restaurants and cinemas and hustling nutters on the make. It was grown-up, scary and serious. Urban in every sense, rather than tediously provincial. London seemed to coalesce all our obsessions at once. Not only were the streets full of cars we coveted – the Lotus Elans and the Triumph TR7s and Jaguar XJSs like the one driven by the Saint – but the Tube was decorated with the very posters we’d spent hours copying laboriously at home. And there, at last, were the cinemas whose logos we’d drawn – the Empire Leicester Square, the Cannon Haymarket, the Lumiere Covent Garden. Often, we were treated to a quarter pounder with cheese at the MacDonalds near the bottom of Dean Street. This felt intensely glamorous, as the only restaurants Hitchin had at the time were the Wimpy Bar on Sun Street and a single Indian restaurant, the Rawalpindi, where our father had once taken us for tandoori chicken, the only dish our finicky English tastebuds could palate.

When we finally found the Vintage Magazine Shop, a boxy little dive with a dingy basement on Earlham Street, it was like discovering Tutankhamun’s tomb. It was stuffed from floor to ceiling with racks of all the treasure we’d dreamed of. Posters, stills, movie memorabilia and related kitsch galore. And, of course, magazines: thousands of copies of everything from kids' mags such as Eagle and the Beano, to film titles like Sight and Sound, to Marvel comics and soft porn. The very atmosphere of the place was thrilling – dusty, hushed, specialist. The first thing you encountered on going through the door was the framed quad-crown poster for James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause, their star item, which never seemed to get sold. I can’t remember its exact asking price, but it was probably something like seventy-five quid. To buy it now would set you back over two grand.

On our many future visits we would spend a good two hours going through tubs of 10”x8” stills, all in clear plastic wallets to protect them, searching for the familiar faces of Roger or Sean or Barbara Bach. There were scores of rare exhibitor's campaign books , or pressbooks – brochures that were never intended for public consumption, but were for cinemas or the print media to browse iterations of the film poster and other promotional tie-in items. There were packs of FOH stills – Front of House colour photographs – which usually appeared in glass-boxed displays under the poster outside an Odeon. Lamentably, these are long gone now, but as kids we used to love the glimpse they afforded of the actual film as we queued for Nickelodeon or The Rescuers or The Waterbabies. Even rarer were lobby cards, the American equivalent of FOH stills, which were larger and more lavish. There was a full set for the Spy Who Loved Me, with thrilling pillar-box red borders, which we salivated over but couldn’t afford. We begged our mother to buy them for Christmas. And lastly there were the ‘quads’, which were the standard 30x40” posters that appeared outside British cinemas, and which were too pricey, but provided endless fascination. By this time, we realised that film memorabilia could be traded, so we often went away with a few cheap items in the hope we could swap it for Bond stuff via the trusty Film Review ads.

The Vintage Magazine Shop later moved to a roomier address on Brewer Street in the 1980s, with its familiar crimson exterior and big picture of Bogart smoking a fag over the door. While it remained a thrilling Aladdin’s cave, selling everything from Betty Blue fridge Magnets to entire collections of 1970s Mad magazine, it was becoming a tourist trap, and never reproduced the rarefied atmosphere of the original shop. It was at the new premises that my brother and I spent the exorbitant sum of £25 on a boxed, Goldfinger Aston Martin. Pristine as it was, with all its working features and original stickers, it wasn’t as thrilling as coming across the broken Bond DB5 on Hitchin’s Antique Market that we'd snapped up a few years before. The poster for Rebel Without a Cause was nowhere to be seen either. I like to think someone stole it and has it framed over their fireplace.

When a full UK lockdown was finally announced by our lying, incompetent government on Monday 23^rd March, a number of writers commented, hey, it’s not so bad after all, Shakespeare wrote King Lear under similar conditions in 1606. A day later, many of those same writers – mainly those with children – were wondering how they’d failed to write even a simple home-delivery shopping list between awaking at 6am for a day-long fiasco of chaotic home schooling, fervid anxiety about money and vulnerable loved ones, and an evening of epic drinking. After a week, the thought of using lockdown for anything creative such as writing was not only practically impossible, but conscionably obscene, with over forty people dying an hour, and frontline NHS staff without adequate PPE or testing. The future, like everything else, had been abruptly cancelled. The present is all we have.

In Shakespeare’s lifetime, 1606 wasn’t the first time the London theatres were closed due to plague. At the beginning of his career, in 1592, he was forced to flee London to Titchfield, the country seat of the Countess of Southampton and mother to the Earl of Southampton, ‘the lovely youth’ of the sonnets. There he was commissioned to write a long poem, a work which became ‘Venus and Adonis’. One theory is that he’d already been to Titchfield two years previously, hired by Lord Cecil to write a series of sonnets encouraging the young Earl – who went by the nickname ‘Rosely’ – to marry Cecil’s niece. These sonnets – nineteen of them, one for each year of the Earl’s life – centred around the importance of propagation. The greatest sin, the poems urged, was for Rosely to die without issue, and be forgotten by posterity and future generations: ‘But if thou live remembered not to be/ Die single, and thine image dies with thee’. It’s easy to imagine the writing of these poems marked the moment Shakespeare fell in love with the Earl. By the penultimate sonnet, he’s digressed from the task in hand to wondering how he can ever write the beauty of the youth’s eyes, and comparing him to a summer’s day.

One of the few moments of mental calm during lockdown has been provided Patrick Stewart’s reading of a sonnet a day. The daily sight of his huge, grinning, magnanimous face delivering the immortal lines of the first nineteen sonnets has been a rare pleasure. The poems’ themes of vanishing youth, of mortality, of the cycle of life, of ‘lovely April’s’ quick effacement by ‘devouring time’, seem to speak to our moment. Life – and the lives of those in critical care – seems to be held in the balance. This is a pivotal, fulcrum moment for them – for society, too. Will we strive to make the world a fairer place in the future, once that future finally arrives? Perhaps the livelihoods of all key workers, from healthcare staff to delivery drivers, will be held in greater esteem once this is over. Maybe just clapping and banging pots and pans from our doorstep won’t be enough. Those who voted in the present government should never forget they owe their lives to these workers, and vote accordingly at the next opportunity, or face the consequences should a similar plague ever visit us again. ‘For never-resting Time leads summer on/ To hideous winter and confounds him there,/Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,/ Beauty o’ersnowed and bareness everywhere’.

This essay was first published in April 2020 in 3:AM Magazine

Despite it not being the year of a Bond release, I saw plenty of 007 on the big screen during 1978. By the age of nine, my brother and I had come to relish the whole thrilling ritual of going to ‘the pictures’. Everything about it was addictive. The exterior of the cinema with its quad posters and Front of House stills. The queue at the confectionary counter for our packets of Maltesers and Kia-Oras (popcorn was yet to hit big in those days). Then the sarcophagal darkness of the auditorium. The glammy ads for Martini and Marlboro (and the not so glammy ones for local restaurants and amenities, including the dependable Rawalpindi). Then the piping Pearl and Dean theme before the trailers for coming attractions (in 1978 these would include Smokey and the Bandit, Convoy and The Pink Panther Strikes Again). Finally, the closing of the curtain as if the evening was over before it even began, followed by the hush before it pulled back again and the silent appearance of the film’s certificate from the British Board of Film Classification, providing an official seal on what we were about to see. To this day, I love the moments before a film almost as much as the movie itself. It signals that for two hours I’m about to descend into another world and leave my troubles behind.

In the spring of '78, our mother took us to Aylesbury to go shopping. Why she chose this destination is not clear, but we were often on the road to Oxfordshire to see the Bannisters. Since our parents’ separation, this meant that we travelled with either our mother or our father separately, as they both knew Mark and Kathy Bannister equally well, but never together. Our mum must have planned this trip with a degree of cunning, as showing that day at the Aylesbury Odeon was a double bill of two Bond movies we hadn’t seen before: Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun. Just as well, as in those pre-VHS days, it would be 1980 before ITV saw fit to screen both films.

And so our mother parked us in the almost empty Odeon just after lunch for over four and a half hours of impossible glamour, action and suspense. Of crocodiles and voodoo and speedboats. Of Chinese junks and Solar Agitators and the best-dressed spy in the world. The double-bill was a 70s thing in way that seems curious now. Although US cinemas in the 60s had often paired movies, it was only then just getting going in the UK. It’s a big deal, asking audiences to sit through four or even five hours of entertainment in the dark. Hitchcock famously said a film’s length should be timed to the endurance of the human bladder. But double-bills were everywhere, so they must have been justifiable box-office-wise. Bullitt with Bonnie and Clyde. Rollerball with Juggernaut (no, me neither). There was even a double bill of The Spy Who Loved Me with The Pink Panther Strikes Again later in the year, with Bond and the cartoon feline back-to-back on the poster, holding guns in the classic 007 pose. Maybe the popularity of double-bills was down to parents who just wanted to offload their kids for an afternoon of shopping.

No matter, the experience of Golden Gun and Live and Let Die was monumental: a high point of our young lives. Curiously, the films were shown out of sequence to their release dates. So we were treated to Golden Gun first. This, as it turned out was right on many levels, not least of which being that it allowed Moore’s relaxed second turn as Bond to seduce us before his more egregious debut. In retrospect, Golden Gun is a high-camp, kinky oddity. A scoop of 70s sleaze, with its three-nippled villain and bare flesh everywhere, most notably Britt Ekland’s in her almost non-existent turquoise bikini. Not only is it a cocktail of racy thrills, but also casual racism and toxic innuendo, most of which went over our heads as usual. None of this mattered to two nine-year olds. What did matter was the film’s incredible imagination (courtesy of new screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz in tandem with old hand Maibaum). There was villain Scaramanga’s island hideaway and its lurid Funhouse, built for sadistically toying with his victims before shooting them with his self-assembled Golden pistol (yes, we wanted one as much as a Walther PPK). And then there was Scaramanga’s flying car, and Bond’s stolen Toyota in which he does an incredible loop-the-loop stunt over a broken bridge. Also M16’s off-kilter office in the beached wreck of the Queen Elizabeth in Hong Kong harbour. And so on.

What’s more, the association of sex and death was heavy-handedly present in almost every scene. Lulu’s piercing title song told us ‘Love is required whenever he’s hired/ It comes just before the kill’. Or was that he comes just before the kill? And sure enough, there was Maud Adams obliging the icy Christopher Lee (who we vaguely knew had played Dracula) before she too cops a golden bullet. By the time Bond pilots a seaplane to the pristine Thai island of Khao Phing Kan to face down Scaramanga in the last act we’re lost to Bond’s world. This is all real, gripping, vital. It’s all actually happening. Will Bond survive the Funhouse? Will he even survive Britt Ekland’s Mary Goodnight; a 'ditzy blonde' who almost does for our hero when she nudges the wrong button with her bikini-clad behind (that kinkiness again). Of course, he has to survive or he wouldn’t return in The Spy Who Loved Me, as the end-roller tells us he will, while Bond sails away in a junk over the South Seas.

After The Man With The Golden Gun, not only were we shaken and stirred, but we were also slightly confused. Following the example of the formidable Anya Amasova in Spy, why was Bond’s leading lady such a dolly bird? And why, after seeing the immensely tall Jaws a few months before, was Bond’s adversary now immensely small – the diminutive Nick Nack, played with knowing menace by Hervé Villechaize? It was all highly troubling.

But we didn’t have an opportunity to think about these imponderables. Before we had time to leave our seats for a pee, Live and Let Die was tearing up the screen, with its blend of Blaxploitation, urban cool and unstoppable energy. A mournful gospel score soundtracks a funeral on a New Orleans street. Without warning a shady man in a Panama hat is stabbed before being swallowed up by a coffin. The mood flips and the crowd erupts into a jamboree with a Dixieland band leading the procession. Those reversals again. You never got used to them - or enough of them. Then we’re at the UN, where the British delegate gets a deadly shock through his earpiece. Then we’re on the (fictional) Caribbean island of San Monique, watching another sweating white dude in a suit get bitten by a snake in a crazed voodoo ritual. All before our hero had appeared on the screen, or Paul McCartney has sung his immortal lines about being young and your life being an open book.

In many ways, Live and Let Die is the most problematic film in the Bond series. Forty years later, James and I would sit through it again on the hard seats of a room above a pub, hosted by the Tufnell Park Film Club. It was, to our eyes, a creaky old mess. The only redeeming feature was that the Club had somehow persuaded the wonderful Madeline Smith (who plays Moore’s squeeze in his first ever scene as Bond) to introduce the film. Simon Winder, in his book The Man Who Sold Britain, writes about a similar feeling on revisiting the film when he showed it to his children. It left him ‘mute with grief. The film was a mean-spirited and offensive shambles, too stupid really even to be racist, too chaotic to be camp’. While perhaps overly pejorative, he has a point. It’s certainly ponderously directed in places, with a speedboat chase that seems to just go on forever, and no over-arching driving plot where Bond has to save the world. The film is really just a series of great set-pieces, the most memorable of which were the bus that gets ripped in half during a chase, and Bond’s escape from the alligator sanctuary by using the backs of crocs as steeping stones. Years later, as a thirty-year-old mature student at UCL, while reading the moment in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus escapes from the Cyclops using his ingenuity rather than brute force, I would recall the suited Roger Moore leaping over the water in the mango swamp. Indeed, Bond is the archetypal hero who uses his wits, rather than just his fists, to win.

But the film’s adjacency to 1970s Black culture is still uneasy. Live and Let Die seems to have jumped on the Blaxploitation movie bandwagon, co-opting it for its own purposes, while loosely tying it to the plot of Fleming’s novel, which was about Bond foiling the smugglers of seventeenth-century gold coins in the Caribbean. Director Guy Hamilton and screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz are happy to present Harlem as a clichéd den of thieves, with everyone from cab drivers to shoeshine boys hip to the act. It also depicts the Black villains using a white woman (Solitaire, played with virginal grace by Jane Seymour) as a chattel and a honey trap. Having said that, on watching the film again, Bond the Colonial interloper is fooled at every turn by his Black enemies. They are way smarter, and way better dressed, even by Bond’s Savile Row standards, duded-out in Chesterfield coats, black leather gloves and pimp hats. Though Bond doesn’t get taken outside and ‘wasted’, as Mr Big instructs, he gets taken to the cleaners. He’s the alien abroad, the fish out of water, the honky mug fooled twice by the seating arrangements in the Fillet of Soul restaurant, whose revolving booths take him into the hands of the enemy. He’s even trapped in the back of a taxi by the same cab driver who delivered him to Kananga’s lair in the first place. Not great spy-work there, 007.

Tom Mankiewicz, in an on-screen interview, admitted to being aware of the danger of writing all the villains as Black characters. He reveals the racist, shit-kicking character of Sheriff W.D Pepper was created for the purposes of satire, to give the audience a ridiculous white man they could laugh at. Pepper returns in The Man with the Golden Gun, with even more racism, at one point calling the East Asian population ‘pointy heads’. Confusingly for us, when we saw Golden Gun and Live and Let Die out of sequence, we had no idea who this absurd caricature was supposed to be. Yet, despite the filmmakers’ attempts at even-handedness, Live and Let Die still presents a world struggling, and failing, to come to terms with racial and cultural difference. The voodoo ritual that Bond crashes in the third-act plays straight into the worst white-settler fears of savage natives and rough magic. Naturally, all these disharmonious resonances were lost on two young boys in the Aylesbury Odeon whose hearts were still, just about, open books.

*

Four decades later, I would return to Fleming’s novels in preparation for a Backlisted podcast about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The accusations of racism and misogyny in Bond were bound to come up, and I was hyper-alert to them as I scribbled in the margins, comparing the original novels with the films. If nothing else, it was an excuse to read all the books again for the first time since early adolescence. What I found was surprising, if not revelatory. For a start, there was something wonderfully tangible and vivid about Bond’s world on the page. Fleming knows how to evoke the stink of the Everglades, or a heroine’s perfume, or how to convey the exact tactile grip of Bond’s Beretta or Walther PPK. The prose is luxurious, alive with Fleming’s formidable descriptive powers; his mastery of dialogue, his mise-en-scène, his plotting, pacing and rich characterisation. He makes the action sing. There’s a dexterity to his writing that any fiction writer would admire. The idiom is English, not American. It’s not a Chandleresque register, but that of Buchan or Waugh. A supremely visual writer, he also makes sure to include all the senses, the sounds and smells and textures of lived experience. This, I realised, is what we loved as young readers. We disappeared into an immersive world, full of sensation. It was another way of escaping our rapidly deteriorating domestic situation. All the other stuff was arcane to us: the politics, the espionage, the world history; the adult arenas of sex and travel; alien emotions such as ennui or sexual disgust. All mystifying to two ten-year-olds, but tantalising nonetheless.

Most striking was Fleming’s gift for the creation of character; his Dickensian genius for portraiture; his grotesques and neurotics. Like all great writers, he had an instinct for emphasis; where to slow down and where to speed up. While an action scene might be over in a few lines, there’ll be two pages describing Le Chiffre’s face, or three pages on the monstrous Drax. The effect is to show how physiognomy might reveal the psyche. Like Fitzgerald spending a whole paragraph on Gatsby’s charming but equivocal smile, Fleming will linger over his villains until he (and we) understand them better. Like Dickens, he wrote his books with great energy and little revision. There’s a spontaneous life to his villains that is wholly compelling. In addition, Fleming was the first thriller writer to put real perversity into his evil characters. It’s there from the first book with Le Chiffre’s whips. John Brosnan, in a rare moment of insight, suggests the antecedent of the Bond villains is ‘not Al Capone, but Dracula’. There’s something satanic and sexually deviant about them. There’s also the Freudian notion that their transgression began with their infant sexuality. In a couple of novels, Bond imagines what his villains were like as children: cruel, greedy kids.

Another big surprise was that he wrote women very well, a rarity for male authors of the 1950s (and now). On rereading, nearly all Bond’s women are revealed as complex, independent and tough, with a core of mystery. Fleming liked his women to be coarsely somatic, to be real, living beings with the same appetites and proclivities as men. None of Bond’s women in the books are helpless damsels like Golden Gun’s Mary Goodnight. None are ‘Bond girls’ in the accepted sense, familiar from the films. They are largely formidable femmes libres, from the double agent Vesper Lynd in the first novel Casino Royale, to policewoman Gala Brand in Moonraker, who could ‘break Bond’s arm quicker than he could break hers’. What’s more, they are very definitely women, not girls. They have agency; they sweat and swear. Honeychile Rider in Fleming’s Dr No has ‘authority in the voice’. We learn very quickly that she’s just killed her abusive husband with a poisonous spider, a detail tactfully omitted from the film version. The women in the Bond novels are not the insipid floosies of some of the films. Fleming also paints male relationships with great sensitivity. Witness Bond’s bromance with Felix Leiter across several books, or the respectful, fearful, adoring, father-son relationship he has with M.

In his own way, Fleming gives us the truth about men and women. Even though one would pin them as a genre fiction, the Bond novels frequently transcend the prison of the conventional spy thriller. While Fleming is not Turgenev – there’s little moral complexity or psychological depth in the Bond books; it all very Manichaean, with black hats versus white hats – he plunges us into a uniquely believable world, one that never really existed. It’s a fantasy of super-potency; of Britain as a world power that never faded. A boy’s own world of action-adventure transposed to the realm of adult sexuality and sadism. As Simon Winder splendidly observed, Bond is essentially ‘Biggles with a cock’. Despite working in naval intelligence, Fleming didn’t aim for verisimilitude. His Bond-world rarely reflects the gritty realities of espionage. For that, readers would have to wait until the early 60s for John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. There you find a world of shadows, opaque misinformation, false names, dead drops and microfilms in tobacco tins. The book’s hero, Alec Leamas, is an ‘alcoholic wreck’. At one point he remarks: ‘What do you think spies are: priests, saints, martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards’. By contrast, Bond’s world is of full of light and action and certainty, with outlandish names we’re meant to believe, and exotic locations we’ll never visit. The world opens up with Bond. What I loved as a child reading the novels was that you got to go places and learn things. You learn about golf, horse-racing, chemin de fer, rocket science. Bond’s frame of cultural reference is truly impressive, from international politics, to art, to anthropology, to zoology. You didn’t find any of this in the dank world of Le Carré’s dysfunctional spooks.

Fleming cleverly makes sure the essence of Bond’s character is elusive. He’s undoubtedly a snob, with his Savile Row suits, Morland's Turkish cigarettes and Pinaud Elixir shampoo (‘that prince among shampoos’). In Goldfinger, he looks down on a sweating patsy in his ‘Abercrombie and Fitch’. In the same book he admits: ‘I don’t drink tea. It’s mud. And it’s one of the main reasons for the downfall of the British Empire’. He’s even snobbish about the new fivers: ‘The old ones were the most beautiful money in the world’. Bond is cosmopolitan, urbane, the opposite of a fusty provincial. Yet, despite his Fettes and Oxbridge education, Bond is strangely classless. He’s uncomfortable in the stratification of the British class system, which he sees as a prison. He’s the opposite of clubbable. He disdains the aristocracy and the nouveau riche. His most natural and uncomplicated associates in the books are the working-class characters, such as the caddy in Goldfinger or the Marseille cab driver Marius in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Or the Cayman islander Quarrel in Live and Let Die and Dr No. Or self-made men like Darko Kerim Bey in From Russia with Love, with his extended family of sons and cousins working for his Istanbul intelligence network. Furthermore, Bond is oddly ascetic, given his proclivities for fine food and drink. ‘It was the puritan in him,’ we read after Bond has ‘the best meal of his life’ of stone crabs and pints of ice-cold pink champagne in Goldfinger. He’s revolted because ‘he’d got what he wanted and easily’.

While rereading the books, it became clear that the character of Bond had become distorted, not augmented, by the films. In the novels, Bond has (unavoidably) a real interior. While he’s not Tolstoy’s Levin or Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Bond suffers and yearns and dreams like the rest of humanity. The big revelation is that Bond is surprisingly innocent – he’s not just the cynical agent of the British Government, sated with women and high-living, creased with ennui. He’s intensely vulnerable and alive, and always shocked at the level of evil, megalomania and paranoia of each of his nemeses. Above all, he’s interested in them as human beings.

What surprised me even more was that, far from being a predator or a harasser of the opposite sex (something his film incarnation veers perilously close to), Bond is helpless in the face of his women. He falls in love with just about every one of them. He’s not just interested in notches on bedposts. There’s a fundamental respect there. In Thunderball, Bond states: ‘Whore, tart and prostitute were not words Bond used about women’. Admittedly, Fleming slightly undermines this respect by devoting a whole paragraph to how women are ‘a hazard on the road’, on the following page. But let’s not split hairs. It’s with women where Bond’s vulnerability is most manifest. And – surprisingly – with his job, which is essentially killing people. Not only is Bond a nervous flier in the Bond books, but he hates killing. In the opening of Goldfinger he reflects: ‘he had never liked doing it’. He suggests he was ‘too intense, too introspective’ to be a cold-blooded assassin. Bond castigates himself, not because he thinks of these as bad qualities, but because they are ‘unprofessional’. Bad for the mission. Fleming’s Bond is full of feeling. He suppresses his emotions in order to become a killing machine, but he’s acutely sensitive. This, of course, is why we follow him over the course of twelve novels and two volumes of short stories. I was shocked to find that Bond cries in virtually every book. Even Fleming forgets this, writing more than once that Bond ‘cries his first tears since infancy’.

Lastly, there’s the question of racism. Undeniably, the Bond novels embody the attitudes of the decades in which they were written. They are supremely ‘of their time’, which is not to excuse their infelicities. The most overt racism occurs in Goldfinger, with Fleming’s presentation of Oddjob, who is referred to as ‘that Korean ape’. Yet, there’s less othering going on in the Bond novels than in the Bond films. Fleming’s Bond is a man of the world, used to meeting men and women of every creed and colour. While Dr No’s Chinese heritage is presented as ‘exotic’, it’s the sexual and biological otherness that Fleming focuses on. All of Bond’s villains have physical abnormalities which have little to do with their race (and accusations of ableism are valid here). There are the steel tongs of Dr No’s hands, and the fact he’s ‘one in a million who have their heart on the right side of their body’. But he’s no racist caricature in the tradition of Fu Man Chu. Living in Jamaica, as Fleming did when he wrote all of the Bond novels, he lived side by side harmoniously with the Caribbean islanders. By all accounts, there was a respect and parity there that’s mirrored in the books. The Black characters in the novels are Bond’s equals as men. In the case of Quarrel, there’s no hint of Crusoe and Man Friday, of massa and servant. There’s certainly none of the queasy and offensive othering we find in the film version of Live and Let Die, at which Fleming would undoubtedly have cringed.

While rereading the Bond books, I was struck again and again by how radically Fleming’s Bond differed from the character travestied by his movie counterpart. The Bond of the films is revealed as the most sexist, misogynist, casually racist masculine role model you could present to two nine-year-old twins. It was certainly not what we needed at the time. And yet, in another sense, Bond was precisely what we needed. Because James Bond was always in control. Once our parents separated, and our stepfather arrived on the scene, we felt any sense of agency had been ceded; that we were passive victims in our own lives. Only James Bond 007 could save us.

Where to start?

For a long time, I was put off beginning anything by Iris Murdoch's (correct) observation that 'All novels are the wreck of a good idea'. Most writers don't start in the sense that they can look back and think this is where it all began. They don't begin by readying the quill pen, rolling up their sleeves before applying it to a sheet of pristine foolscap to inscribe Chapter One in a regal hand. Most writing projects are begun with an idea that strikes when they're nowhere near a sheet of paper or able to access their i-Phone's notes function. In the shower. Or changing a nappy. Or in the middle of a meeting at work. Whether it's a poem or a screenplay or an epic novel, all start with what Martin Amis described as 'a throb'. The good vibration of a sound idea. One that will carry you through the years of poverty and breakdown required to complete it. The throb marks the moment when dreaming becomes action, when potential and possibility finally have to solidify into something actual. Or, as David Hare said about the vague feeling of melancholy that accompanies the catharsis of starting a project: 'Once it was everything. Now it has to be something'.

In this sense, the problem of beginning is, paradoxically, more like the problem of ending. The great dilemma of when – and how – to call time on all prior, failed attempts. Those false starts and bum-steers that litter or plague every writer’s so-called career (and, if it's a first book, they don’t have one yet). At what point can they definitively say to the world: ‘Hi. Here I am. Please give me a paragraph’s grace, because, despite the oppressive weight of 400 years of soaring prose from Cervantes to Woolf to Baldwin, I’m going to have a go myself’? Only when they can confidently announce the above will they be able to ditch the unpublishable crap they nevertheless secretly hope will one day be appended to their Collected Works under ‘Juvenilia’.

Naturally, a beginning shouldn’t be seen as merely a gauntlet set down by the greats. An artist must first have something to say, as Kandinsky warned, axiomatically. It’s how to say what you have to say that forms the crux of the problem. The overall tone or mode or register, let alone fundamental questions of exposition, or first-person versus third, et cetera. The opening line is a bell that has to be struck from the very first word. Heaney, in the introduction to his translation of Beowulf, called this ‘finding the enabling note’. And the musical metaphor is apt. Start off in the wrong key, and it’s all downhill from there.

Like the famous deathbed line (Nelson’s, Larkin’s), the famous first line also exerts an anxiety of influence. There was no possibility of taking a walk that . . . If I am out of my mind, it’s . . . All happy families. You get the picture. Judging by the preceding examples, a quiet or neutral tone seems the best option. But thinking about it too much can be paralysing. The original first line of my first novel, Byron Easy, was: I must never get my hands on a gun. I remember where I was when I wrote it. I was lying on a wine-spattered futon in a Crouch End attic room, not dissimilar to the one Byron almost immolates in the novel. At the time I was working in a recording studio and not earning much money. I wish I could say I was sharing a hipbath with Vicky Licorish, as Jeanette Winterson states in her introduction to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but I have nothing so glamorously demi-monde to offer. However, a roll-up cigarette was most certainly dwindling in my pub-stolen Bass ashtray. A January rain was spitting inimically against the sash window. And I was flushed with the adrenalin of beginning. On balance, I was pretty proud of the line. I felt I had located the voice; had ended all my previous failed attempts to hear it. What’s more, this opening salvo was – rather self-consciously, as I knew Byron Easy was to be a failed poet – a pentameter. I must never get my hands on a gun. I imagined this was mighty clever until, many years later, my agent drew a crisp blue line though it, yawning that she had ‘read it all before.’ And she was correct. It’s the opening line of a third-rate thriller.

Thus began the long process of revision. The beginning pages of a novel are always the ones that endure the most stringent rewriting, and Byron Easy was no exception. Looking at the present opening pages again, they are almost unrecognisable from those of the Crouch End days. They seem more a palimpsest, a mosaic formed from the competing demands of establishing character, incident, narrative momentum, and, of course, voice. In the end, I settled for My name is Byron Easy. Logical, perhaps, with the book being an eponymous novel (although that title changed over time too. One working handle was Station to Station. Second-hand, yes, but not as rubbish as Trimalchio in West Egg). Announcing the protagonist in the first line has precedent, of course. Call me Ishmael. Although, frustratingly, little is made of this spellbinding narrator’s name in the remaining 500 pages of Melville’s epic. And maybe, looking back, too much is made of mine. It’s easy to get carried away when juvenilia is still shackling one’s ankles. No matter. I had solved the problem of beginning, and (not quite the same thing in terms of becoming a novelist) of making a start.

The worst thing a writer can do, while in the act, is imagine the paragraph they’re struggling with appearing between stout hardcovers on a groaning Waterstone’s table – that heart-stoppingly glamorous moment of seeing the finished artefact sitting there, ticking intelligently; a literary time-bomb, waiting to explode in the face of an unsuspecting reader. To become self-conscious about the future of the work is fatal. Just get it down, the mad voice insists, inwardly.

The same practical attitude should apply to the writing process. I wish I'd encountered Ray Bradbury’s peerless advice ('put your butt in the chair and write on a regular basis') much earlier. After I'd finished my first novel - which was written all over the place - I decided to stick to a very strict and controlled regime. Alarm, 6.10 am. Blind trudge to the living-room desk, 6.30. An oil drum of tea. Commence reading back the previous day’s work, 7.30 . . . Helplessly peruse a paragraph of Nabokov, Turgenev, Alice Munro – succulent breakfast sweetmeats, 7.40. . . Then, at some point, inspiration would take one up on its wings, and actual writing would get done. Until 9.30 am, when it was time (for this author at least) to think about making an actual living. But it was a satisfyingly predictable and ordered routine – undergone at the same desk, six days a week. Trollope would have patted me on the head. What brought it to an end was the arrival of small children. I still get up early, but any writing now has to end at 7.30am.

It's a much-discussed fact that where one writes can profoundly influence a novel. In retrospect, there was something to be said for writing my debut all over the place – like one of those road albums (Led Zep II, say) where each track is recorded and mixed in a different studio. I always feel one can tell: can detect the different textures, spot the joins. The wide, plane-tree-planted streets of Crouch End were the backdrop for the writing of the first chapter of the book, along with chunks of the second and third. So far, so conventional. There probably isn’t a living room in Crouch that hasn’t had a novel attempted in it over the years. And I liked my two years of living there – maybe the lack of a Tube station, the village vibe, informed the fiction. There’s something hopeful and energetic and concentrated about that first chapter. After this idyll, the rest of the book was written on a helter-skelter ride through different locations. A streaking GNER train for the railway sequences (literally looking out of the window, pen in hand). A Brockley back bedroom, belonging to a girlfriend, for Byron’s back story (covering up what I was scribbling, like Austen, every time she came noseying in). The august library at UCL – oddly enough, some of the more erotic passages were forged here. Boredom? Or all that dry-as-dust learning making one horny? Other pages were whipped off in notebooks on the way to gigs; in the bath; in stolen moments at eccentric times of the day. Finally, the book was completed on an ailing PC in the Walthamstow flat where I was living at the time; facing a cancelled piece of brickwork to maximise concentration; endlessly reworking the last chapters. It’s a wonder any of it adds up. If you happen to be considering a novel, don’t try this at home. Office space, regular hours, and an en-suite jacuzzi is the way to go.

Yet, looking back, nothing can beat the unfettered freedom of those Crouch End pages. The occasional luxury of writing all day until dusk fell; then looking down from an attic window, Larkin-style, onto the heads of people waiting for the W7 bus; a sunset honouring the green glass of Alexandra Place. And all of it stored in the memory banks, ready to force my hand across the virgin page the following morning. All I needed to do was forget Iris Murdoch.

In the 1970s, there was a vague lifestyle movement (fuelled by Habitat) to make the kitchen the heart of the home. This never quite took off in our house. For a start, our kitchen was too small. Situated next to the cellar, it was cramped, with overflowing alcoves of crockery and cups dangling by hooks. There was a cheap Baby Belling cooker and gadgets such as a food-mixer and kitchen scales attached to the white-brick walls to save space. Very much not a fitted kitchen of the type that took over in the 80s, its only storage space for cleaning products was a cubby hole under the sink protected by a blue cloth on a cord. This I was too scared to pull open as it often revealed the happy homes of spiders. There was a small, polished pine dining table with four chairs, which proved inadequate whenever our friends crowded round for tea or a birthday party. Meals were usually served up in the living room, requiring much toing-and-froing up the stairs with trays and pans. My mother complained that we needed a dumb waiter of the type found in posh country houses.

Often, the kitchen smelt of burnt toast, or lamb fat from my father’s go-to meal of grilled lamb chops, Smash and peas. The walls bore the usual childish scribbles and sketches – bug-eyed monsters or the Red Arrows or pirate treasure maps. At one point there was a large Mr Men poster on the far wall, but it didn’t last long. I can’t remember what replaced it. At Christmas, an advent calendar would be hung next to the door, with its tantalising windows hiding foil-wrapped chocolate. Overall, the space was singularly undecorated, functional, bare. And always cold on winter mornings, with its uneven, foot-chilling indigo tiles only adding to the discomfort.

Our meals were the predictable British 70s fare, starting with breakfast. For me and my brother, this was nearly always cereal of the tooth-rotting variety. Golden Nuggets. Frosties. Ricicles. Or my favourite, Sugar Puffs, floating on a sea of saccharine milk. Later, our mother put an end to this sugary madness, and insisted on Sainsbury’s own-brand Weetabix in its distinctive oblong green box, or eventually the hated Shredded Wheat. Shreddies, however, whose little wheaty squares sprinkled with Lyle’s were surprisingly good, were just about acceptable. For her own bowl, she favoured Alpen, muesli being a new-fangled 70s innovation. We tried it once and found there were too many nuts and too few raisins. Looking back, I can see her choice was linked to her health-kick after our future-stepfather Keith came on the scene. Our dad, when he was home, would cook up a full English with salty slabs of back bacon and fried eggs swimming in oil. As an alternative, he would just have toast: cutting great slabs of grainy wholemeal with our trusty breadknife on which he slathered Golden Shred marmalade or Gales Country Honey. As we didn’t have a toaster, he would inevitably burn his breakfast under the grill, filling the kitchen with the not-unpleasant smell of carbonised scrapings.

Lunch or dinner was the usual 70s horror of something tinned or from a packet. Spam was a favourite of my mother’s, for some reason. A hangover from WWII rationing, with its horrid golden jelly and bland processed taste, Spam was repellent. It was only ever edible when my mother cooked it up in batter, a fearful concoction called Spam fritters. Often, we’d gobble the batter and leave the tongues of pink meat, like sensible children. Much mileage was gained from Heinz tinned spaghetti on thick-sliced Sunblest; always with Stork SB or Blueband margarine, never butter. For chilly days there was Bachelor’s Cup-a-Soup onto which my mother liberally sprinkled crunchy, semi-burnt croutons. And then there were the trusty fall-backs of Findus Crispy Pancakes. Or Birdseye beefburgers (with onions). Or fishfingers with Mc Cain oven chips and tinned peas. It always impressed us that our mother’s nursing-college friend Jan was married to a man who worked for McCain’s. This was almost like living with a celebrity.

If dinner was homemade, there was the tried-and-tested option of aromatic meatballs made with sage and onion, served with rice, which my mother made to perfection: never soggy, never dry, just right. Or liver and onions, with its ammoniac tang and unusual leathery texture. Or shepherd’s pie, our firmest favourite. We used to lovingly separate its components on the plate, eating the mash first, followed by the carrots, leaving the delicious mince for last. One homemade dish which always disappointed was egg-and-bacon flan. An assault course of gristly meat and underdone pastry, every mouthful had to be tempered with a slug of Robinson’s orange squash to take the taste away. Very occasionally, my mother pushed the boat out and made a spaghetti Bolognese. This was heavenly; the meat juices running from the pasta, revealing salty mince and tender onions. All without the sacrilegious addition of cheese; parmesan not having hit the UK yet, though my mother did have a paperback of Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Food which she rarely used.

Dessert was the arena in which the decade provided a child with real gifts. If it was homemade, it was often sweet, stringy rhubarb with boiling custard, or treacle tart with cold custard (just as wonderful). At Christmas my mother made a peerless trifle, with abundant cream, maraschino cherries, almonds and a weightless sponge; a sump of pure sherry at the bottom. For tea with our friends, it was either Arctic Roll or Angel’s Delight. Both were exquisite. I could never get enough of the log of sponge and strawberry jam with its excitingly cold core of vanilla ice cream. When it came to Angel’s Delight, part of the pleasure was witnessing its creation. To watch the sachet of pink, sherbet-like mixture poured into a bowl, to which was added water, and then see it rise to its weightless perfection, was intolerably wonderful. There was no notional upper limit of how much strawberry Angel’s Delight either me or my brother could scoff. Even choc ices, when they arrived mid-decade, couldn’t begin to compete. In the summer of ’77, our mother made us a James Bond birthday cake shaped as the number seven: a stodgy block covered in snowy icing with 007 set out in sprinkles. It was the best birthday I’d ever had.

For afternoon sweet snacks there were of course biscuits, of which the 70s provided a dizzying array. Bourbons, Jammie Dodgers, Chocolate Digestives and Custard Creams. For special occasions there were Mr Kipling’s Cherry Bakewells with their solid white crown and crumbly pastry. Or his divine Country Slices, with raisins and great granules of sugar on top. These would disappear from their plastic packaging if they weren’t severely rationed. Same for his cuboid Fondant French Fancies or the dependable Sponge Fingers. My mother’s afternoon cake of choice was a Battenberg. There was nothing to compare to a slice of its insanely sweet marzipan outer casing and the pastel-shaded squares of sponge within. However, for real sybaritic indulgence nothing could beat a chocolate marshmallow teacake, its silver and crimson foil wrapper hiding untold pleasure within.

Our weekly trip to Stevenage swimming baths brought us into contact with the world of crisps and chocolate. And what a world that was in 1977. The sharp tang of chlorine will forever be associated with Smiths Square Crisps, a new innovation with their do-it-yourself sachet of salt which you would shake around in the bag. This and other goodies were found in the big vending machine outside the changing rooms. In fact, everything about the pool was big and new and scary. To a seven-year-old it appeared Olympian in size, with a fearsome three-tier diving board at the far end, its space illuminated with abundant natural light from the huge windows. It even had a competition-size viewing gallery where our mother sat as we flailed in our arm-bands. But the vending machine was the reward for the all the fear and discomfort. Along with Square Crisps were the delights of KP Discos and Hula Hoops, Cheese Quavers, Skips and Outer Spacers with their flying saucers on the packet. Then there was Monster Munch which always left your fingers covered in flakes, or crunchy Potato Twists which stuck in your teeth. Along with the standard Golden Wonder ready salted or cheese and onion, there were more exotic choices such as Oxo-flavour Ringos, Rancheros or Discos. Or the supreme smoky-bacon-flavour Frazzles.

If it was chocolate we were after (and it often was), the vending machine spoilt us with choice. From chunky Yorkies or Texans (favoured by macho Keith) to the more delicate delights of Fry’s Chocolate Cream or a Mackintosh Caramac (our mother’s fall-back options). Of course, there were the old staples of Fudge, Curly Wurly, Toffos and Rollos, but also more exotic finds such as a bar of boozy Old Jamaica or a 5p Golden Cup, whose sickly caramel centre always made you regret the choice after a few bites. Our journeys back from the pool, often in the inky darkness of a November night, were always spent on the back seat of the Citroen in an orgy of crisps and chocolate. Nothing could spoil these moments except for the time when we saw Keith sail by in the illuminated window a coach.

Mum and her paramour had been arguing constantly for a while until Keith had disappeared from the house. Where he’d gone, we’d no idea. Most probably back to his own folks up in Yorkshire to lick his wounds. We were glad of his absence as their fights had been getting ever more vicious and disturbing. When he left, Keith had become the unmentionable. After a fortnight, we still didn’t know where he’d disappeared to. Then, one night, our hair matted and reeking of chlorine, we spotted his gaunt visage in the fleeting window of a coach travelling in the opposite direction.

‘Mum, mum,’ I cried. ‘There’s Keith! He’s on the coach.’

She pretended not to have noticed and looked around theatrically.

‘Where? Oh, it must have been someone else.’

‘No,’ James joined in. ‘It was him all right. Where do you think he’s going?’

‘It won’t have been him,’ she insisted ‘Now stop yelling or you’ll make me crash.’

For a second I caught her face in the rear-view. From the way she was biting her bottom lip I could tell she was lying.