In Edinburgh to speak about my new novel Zoo Time at the book festival. I love it up here, watching the rain lashing the austere grey terraces, dodging the street clowns who don’t really belong in so serious a place, visiting the Victorian dead in the marvellously voluble Dean Cemetery (it’s the stones that do the speaking, not the dead), and enjoying the view of Fettes from the window of my hotel. Built in the grand Scots baronial style to educate orphans and the poor, Fettes looks more like a lunatic asylum than a school. If I had a telescope I believe I’d be able to spot Mrs Rochester roaming through those spires, spitting and setting fire to herself. Tony Blair, who coincidentally referred to Gordon Brown as the mad wife in the attic, was a pupil of Fettes. Nothing beats a good start in life. The reason I relish speaking in Edinburgh is the seriousness of the audiences. Attentive listeners, astute readers, and uninhibited laughers. But then you have to be serious to get a good joke.
I can’t decide whether I still get a kick out of publication. Seeing your second book come out is not as exciting as seeing your first, seeing your third is not as exciting as seeing your second, and this is my 17th. I’m not jaded, but it’s brought home to me each time that the real satisfaction of writing is the writing, and the rest is but vanity, froth and disappointment. So why not finish one book and immediately start another, and let everything else — the interviews, the television appearances, the public readings — go hang? Because I like doing them, is one answer. But also because I think they’re necessary. As the written word suffers devaluation by the hour, the last pure pleasure available to a writer — after the act of writing itself, I mean — is the keeping open of live colloquy with readers.
It shouldn’t be difficult to get from Edinburgh to Manchester. A three-hour train journey, relieved by fine scenery, a comfortable seat, and a nice sandwich. But I’m travelling on First, the train company that is soon to oust Virgin, and while they can’t mess up the scenery, they can make a dog’s dinner of everything else. In fact I wouldn’t mind a dog’s dinner, since they’re out of sandwiches before we’ve even left the station. The seats won’t remain upright. And when we get to Preston, an hour late, they throw us off the train. Why? Who knows? But when I ask if it’s anything to do with sandwiches I’m told it isn’t. Doesn’t augur well for the future of the West Coast Main Line. Who would ever have thought we’d be rooting for Virgin?
It could be that it’s not publication that’s making me tense but my birthday. The number I never expected would finally fall to me, the number they talk about in the Bible, the number beyond which a man whose days are few and full of trouble cannot want to survive, is finally here. Cards have been arriving with the actual numerals on. I find this tactless. You number the years on birthday cards up until the age of 16, then you stop. So am I now assumed to be on the threshhold of a second childhood? Will it be numerals all the way from now on until I get to a hundred, when discretion will kick in again?
I celebrate with my family in a restaurant in Manchester. My brother buys me a ukelele, which I have always fancied I’d be able to play the minute I tried. This turns out not to be the case. I serenade my wife with it notwithstanding, reckoning that if I sing ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’ loud enough she won’t detect the bad fingering. My son and daughter-in-law buy me a six-bottle stake in the 2012 vintage of Domaine Chapelle pinot noir; my sister buys me an hour of a chanteuse in a cerise evening dress who sings my favourite Al Bowlly song. Nothing beats being with people who know what you like, however many numerals they burden you with.
It’s 750 years, talking of birthdays, since the town of Wigton, in Cumbria, was granted its market charter. I am here to do my bit, in conversation with Melvyn Bragg. Though I’d like to think the market hall is packed on my account, it’s clear there’s a profound bond between Melvyn and the inhabitants of the town in which he grew up, and when he calls to them they come. It isn’t only nostalgia that binds him to Wigton; he understands himself as nourished, spiritually and intellectually, by the place. And they reciprocate the obligation with a fondness that creates as benign a literary event as I have ever attended. A bit of a scarperer myself, I am taught an important lesson. Those you remember with love, remember you with love in return.