Pieces of Istanbul

It seems perverse to start talking about Istanbul right at the very end, but here goes: we had the loveliest taxi driver on the way back to the airport. All he wanted to do was talk. As the car drifted through the snarled-up streets, eventually the tall buildings fell away, the spaces around the roads got wider and wider and we could see what daylight there was. On our right were some new apartment blocks which could have been Reading, could have been London, could have been anywhere; the sort of characterless imitation of glamour you get when you throw lots of money and not much imagination at a green field.

“One million dollars for a duplex!” our driver said incredulously, before telling us that his flat, in the centre of the city, cost considerably less than that. To our left, visible through the murk, was the Sea of Marmara and the vessels, container ship after container ship, patiently waiting to be filled with cargo and sent out into the Black Sea, off to somewhere exotic that I will never visit. Our driver told us at length about how this works and how they can be moored there for ages, waiting for their next job. I’ve never seen so many ships; it was odd that things so huge could seem so peaceful.

Naturally, we told him how much we had loved Istanbul. It was nice not to have to lie, because we would have said that anyway. It’s like the moment when a friend says “this is the record by my band” or “I wrote this poem” or “I’m cooking something new for dinner tonight, hope you like it” and you listen, read or eat - because you have to - but in the back of your mind you’re dreading the possibility that your friend will turn out to that combination of untalented and deluded that is now almost exclusively the province of the early stages of TV talent shows.

When we said that, he smiled like we had told him he had the prettiest baby in the world. “Next time you come, you should come in May. It is lovely in May. And history! So much history! Next time you come, you should travel around Turkey, not just stay in Istanbul.” He was then distracted by the traffic slowing as it went past an ugly smudge of roadworks, and launched into a tirade about the incompetence of local government. But even then, it sounded like somebody criticising a loveable rogue, with plenty of heat but no spite.

Naturally, we also told him that we had loved the Turks and found them incredibly friendly. This, too, was true. I’ve never stayed anywhere where the people were so unfailingly pleasant to strangers. If you looked lost, people came up to you in the street and offered to help. And you look lost a lot in the old town, in the maze of streets in Sultanahmet, near the Blue Mosque, because in many places they have dispensed with the luxury of signposts telling you which road you are on. On our first night as we were on a corner squinting at a map and scratching our heads, a man had come up and offered his help. Unused to this level of assistance we were chilly and English, and because I am a man I was especially resistant to the idea of getting directions from anybody. “It is your first visit! Welcome to Istanbul. I hope you have a very good time. And you,” he said, indicating me, “you look like Eric Clapton. Very handsome.”

I know he meant it as a compliment, but it took me the rest of my trip to realise that was all it was. He wasn’t trying to sell me anything, or ask for money, he was just being hospitable. For the first, but not for the last, time on my trip I found myself feeling terrible for all the Turkish tourists who might have the misfortune to expect anything even remotely comparable if they ever visited London. It also made me think seriously about shaving off my beard, but then I've never been a fan of Clapton.

When we told the taxi driver how kind everybody had been, he reacted as if this was really no surprise. “Yes, we, the Turks, are the friendliest nation. It is because we are all family. Family is very important in our country. And when we meet someone for the first time, we always ask this one question first: Where are you from? Location is very important. We always want to know where someone is from, that is the defining thing.”

I smiled. He was right, of course, but we had worked that out some time before.


When I told people I was going to Istanbul many of them said one thing. “I bet you’ll get tired of being woken up by the call to prayer.” I don’t think I had ever heard it, so I didn’t know what to expect, and when I eventually did it was nothing like I had expected. Walking up Divan Yolu, one of the main streets, on Christmas Day, we heard it from one minaret and then another, and it wasn’t clear to me whether it was call and response or simply disjointed, strangely out of sync. The overall effect was like somebody having a confusing conversation with himself. Not only that: I thought it would sound celebratory, the way gospel music does, or an uplifting hymn, but instead to my ears it sounded plaintive and somehow sad. Sinister, too.

I could pretend it’s something to do with the nature of broadcasting in that way - to pretend that it’s forcing people to hear things they don’t want to hear, in the same way that mandatory courses and meetings are work are mandatory for a reason, because they are never fun. I could claim that it’s something to do with the image of loudhailers fixed to the side of towers, another thing my prejudices associate with totalitarianism, with mind control or captivity. I could even say that the architecture seemed splendid but threatening, the round domes like spaceships, the minarets pointing at the sky like weapons or missiles.

But pretending is pointless, because prejudices is what they were; unconscious ones perhaps, but prejudices none the less. I wonder if I would have said the same thing ten years ago, or whether it’s a feeling that has seeped into my Western secular consciousness because of everything that has happened since then. It was unpleasant to realise I was thinking that way and to have those judgments brought into the open like that, and to think about how many other people might unquestioningly feel something similar.

Over my time in the city I realised just how wrong those judgments were. To see whole crowds of people - not in a church, not in a mosque, but in public places - united in prayer was a moving and humbling experience. To walk around on the most religious day in the Christian calendar and see more day-to-day evidence of faith and belief in Istanbul, where the twenty-fifth of December is nothing special, than you ever would at home was quite something. And what did everyone back at home believe in instead? The twin values of watching the Doctor Who special and keeping hold of the receipts. And I say that like I’m better than them, when I know I’m not. I don’t even believe in that.

On our final day, we took off our shoes, put them in bags and carried them into the Blue Mosque. It was serene and stunning, and the ceiling glowed in the morning sunlight. I found myself struck, in the banal way of someone who’s never thought deeply about this kind of thing, by the contradictions inherent in religion; that it can build things so beautiful and do things so ugly. A throng of tourists from all over the world gazed up at the incredible dome above and we did what all tourists everywhere do when confronted with something gorgeous; the cameras came out and the flashes winked and we all shot away, trying to capture as much as we could about that huge space, built when none of these things were even imaginable. And I’m sure we all captured what it looked like with varying degrees of success, even if we could only understand a fraction of its significance.

Two stories about Reading (Part 2)

Generally, when we get back to our desks after lunch, the serious business of getting through the afternoon begins. This involves a fine balancing act of conference calls, emails, spreadsheets, sloping off to the kitchen and maybe a quick peek at what’s going on in the wider world. You can guarantee that at some point Iain will have a look at an online sailing forum he frequents called “Sailing Anarchy”; a wonderful idea since I imagine anyone rich enough to be able to afford to sail would have rather a lot to lose from anarchy, much in the same way that it’s always poor people you see looting.

It seems to keep him occupied all the same, occasionally he’ll chuckle and say “look at this” and I’ll wheel my chair over to see a picture of what I assume is some colossal sailing cock up. I will then nod and say “boy, that looks messy”, as I feel this is what is expected of me - even though I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a picture of people sailing well and badly even if they’d run aground in one of the photos, much in the same manner that being completely unable to drive makes me the least critical passenger on earth.

About once a week my IM will ping at roughly 2pm with a message from Iain containing a link to a story from our local online paper, the Reading Post, which Iain and I have both been known to scour for titbits. We don’t do it to work out the latest on crucial local developments like the council’s evil plan to charge everybody for car parking, or what’s happening to the swanky twenty-first century office complex we were meant to have opposite the station and whether, as predicted, it will probably be built halfway through the twenty-second century. No, we read the Post because, I’m very proud to say, Reading is home to some of the strangest people in the cosmos. Not a week goes by without some classic appearing on the front page and me listening to strangulated guffaws from my ginger wingman at the desk next to me as he tries to get his mind round some of the antics of the lunatic fringe of my little town.

The dominatrix was a textbook example.

I defy you to read a news story which begins “A Twyford dominatrix was today cleared of blackmailing her Botox doctor after she secretly filmed him performing a sex act in front of her.” and not be compelled to make your way, agog with fascination, right through to the end of the story. It’s a whole different world out there, one in which a simple story raises so many questions. The sleepy town of Twyford has dominatrices? They have their own dedicated Botox doctors? There are people who are quite happy to give an interview to the local newspaper in which they go on record as saying “I am a normal woman and I am a grandmother. I also happen to be a dominatrix”? Why don’t I need a passport to visit a town in which things like that happen?

Best of all, the woman’s husband was convicted of blackmail, which means there is a subsequent story in the paper which begins “A Twyford man who blackmailed his dominatrix wife’s Botox doctor was today jailed for three and a half years.” Are there many novels with a better opening sentence than that?

It’s not all high end stuff about expensive humiliation, blackmail and cosmetic enhancements. My local paper also captures the grotty side of Reading’s chav subculture perfectly. The classic example has to be the story of the levitating Wheat Crunchie. Under the headline “Forced to move by ghost terror” the Post told the searing exposé of a family who were desperate to move out of their Whitley home because they were convinced that it was plagued by poltergeists.

For the uninitiated, and I hope that’s most of you, Whitley is a part of Reading only slightly less civilised than most parts of Helmand Province. Its unofficial anthem is either “Saturday Night’s All Right For Fighting” or “This Wheel’s On Fire” and if I lived there, I too would make up any old cobblers in a desperate attempt to be rehoused. But if I did, I’m not sure I would mention that my neighbours had seen a solitary crisp rising out of a packet as evidence of supernatural activity. I think, from my experience of horror movies, poltergeists usually do something a bit more impressive like toppling a bookcase. What would the malevolent spirit do for an encore, juggle some Maltesers? The photograph accompanying the story showed the family, with two of the children - both a suspicious shade of ginger - gripping a packet of Wheat Crunchies (Worcester sauce flavour, in case you were interested) as if it was taking all of their strength to stop them jumping into the air. They all looked scared out of their wits, although another possibility is that they never had any in the first place.

The best thing about that story was that an especially eagle-eyed regular reader recognised the haunted mother’s name, did a spot of Googling and found that she had been in the paper more than once. Has someone stolen a six foot inflatable Santa from your front garden? Talk to the paper. Did the pharmacy accidentally give you anti-histamines instead of anti-depressants? Likewise. She’d even managed to get one of the stories into the Daily Mail, which is the equivalent of being selected for our Olympic team to represent Britain in the event of wasting everybody’s time. It’s almost enough to make you proud of being from Reading in its own right.

Those aren’t even my favourite stories in the Post, because I’ve saved the best two for last.

The first one is the story about the security guard which appeared under the headline "Man died after sex act went wrong". He was working the night shift at an office building in the centre of town, and at the end of his shift the security guard covering the day shift (I would say "relieving him" but I won't, for reasons which are about to become apparent) came in to find him lying dead on the floor of the men’s toilets wearing rubber boots, a wetsuit and a gas mask. A gas canister was on the floor next to him. Apparently he wasn’t sure who the mysterious corpse was at first, because only his eyes were visible. Not only that, but they found further latex outfits in the boot of his car and squirrelled away in the ladies’ toilets.

My first instincts on hearing that story were to wonder how many people who are into auto-erotic asphyxiation own more than one wetsuit. Was he keeping one for best? Was he saving a trip to the ladies’ for a special occasion? But more to the point, it all just seemed a bit excessive. I mean, honestly: how good a wank do you want? The vanilla version seems to be enough for most people. And other thing - for most people the effort of putting on a condom can be a bit of a boner killer, but imagine if the condom is thick, black and covers your entire body. Where’s the fun in that?

But the best thing about the story was tucked away in a paragraph towards the end of the story and barely mentioned: it was only his second day in the job.

Generally, it takes me about three months in a new job to feel like I understand the lay of the land. Six months in, I might just about feel up to pinching the occasional pad of Post-It notes or some posh pens. I don’t think I’ve ever felt comfortable enough in a job to knock one out in the gents, let alone do so while making use of some very specialist apparel. What on earth went through his mind when he headed home at the end of day one? "The only thing that could have made that day at work better would be a spot of extreme masturbation" perhaps? Or could it have been "Well, I think I’ve made quite a good impression. Time to dust off the wetsuit"? The mind boggles.

And my favourite story in the Reading Post, you ask? Well, that would be the one that went up last Wednesday, because last Wednesday they published me. They did a competition to let one of Reading’s bloggers write a column in the paper, and I took part and I won. So people at work have had to put up with me being insufferable for the last week as I made the most of the fact that this is probably as close as I’m ever going to come to being a local celebrity. They've borne it with very good grace (more than I deserve). Some people, on the other hand, have been less understanding; I asked Kelly to pick up a few extra copies for people who had shown an interest, and when I got home that evening she greeted me at the door with a look of consternation.

“Are you sure it’s on page 15? I looked and I couldn’t see anything.”

“What do you mean? It’s definitely on page 15. I checked.”

“Oh dear. I couldn’t find it. And I bought loads of copies, I had to go to two different shops. It is the Reading Chronicle we‘re talking about, right?”

At this point I was beginning to feel decidedly stressed.

“It’s not in the Chronicle. It’s in the Post. I told you that! I told you that several times. Jesus, I can’t believe you… oh, you’re joking, aren’t you.”

I sometimes think Kelly only married me for those moments when the penny drops and she can properly start pissing herself laughing.

Being published was the perfect Christmas present and talking about it feels like as appropriate a way as any to wind up my last blog post before the festive season begins in earnest. By the time you read this, with any luck, I will have hopped on a plane and will be taking in a beautiful view across the Bosphorus. My Christmas turkey this year is going to have a capital T, and I can’t think of anything nicer. Anyway, if you’re interested in reading the article, it’s online here and if you want to see what it looked like in the newspaper, a picture is below. Oh, and if you want a copy, it turns out I inexplicably have quite a few lying around. Have a lovely Christmas.

Whiter than white

Viewed out of the corner of my eye, the man in the elf suit looked like the most forlorn man in the world. Try as I might, I couldn’t square the day-Glo quality of his orange shirt and bright green trousers with the pristine snowy desolation of the landscape around him as he stood there beneath the statue of Queen Victoria, rattling a tin for Macmillan Cancer Care. Even from a distance, I could hear it. It’s an interesting design feature; the less money there is in a collecting tin, the more noise it makes.

I had woken up that Saturday morning knowing that I had to run an errand, popping in to Oxford by train to pick up the last of the Christmas presents. A nice, quick trip – in and out in no time, unless of course I was lured astray by the glorious cornucopia of food in the Covered Market, the delicious, oozing cheeses, the warm gooey cookies, the golden pies, their lids struggling to contain the comfort inside. Woozy in my pyjamas, I lifted the blind in the bedroom ever so slightly and I could see out of my window, down to the thin white dusting on the back yard.

”Is it snowing?” mumbled Kelly, only her head visible, a periscope emerging from the duvet.

“It looks like it has, but it’s nothing. It doesn’t look like it’s going to settle”

Famous last words, as it turned out. In the time it took to finish that foolish prophecy, jump into the shower, throw on clothes and lift the Roman blinds in the front room, the sky outside had filled with flakes and the view from the front window was of people trudging through a thick wintry crust of snow on the pavements. The whole thing looked a bit like a Lowry painting, but where had it all come from?

By the time I had slipped and slid grumbling down the hill, crossed over the curved bridge and reached the market square I was sick of the Arctic conditions and I’d barely been out of the flat five minutes, though it felt like longer. My umbrella was pitifully ineffective; there was just too much snow and the wind was ghosting it in at an angle which slipped right underneath any protection its flimsy frame might have been able to offer. I was already beginning to lose sensation in my toes, and my parka was so covered in snow that I had started to look like the sort of living statue you see in Covent Garden or Las Ramblas. And then I saw the man in the elf costume on the other side of the square.

It’s hard to pretend you haven’t seen someone quite so conspicuous, but it didn’t stop everyone else who walked past him. If he’d been a living statue, rooted to the spot, he might have made more money. I did a series of complicated calculations in my head in a split second; I’d have to take my gloves off to get my wallet out, I’d need to take my headphones off to talk to him, I didn’t know if there was any money in my wallet anyway, I’d need to cross the square and risk slipping on the ice I knew perfectly well was lurking underneath the innocent looking snow.

But I did it. I opened my wallet and the only thing in there that wouldn’t have been an insult was a two pound coin. I juggled my headphones, my gloves, my umbrella, my wallet and fished out the money and headed gingerly over to him. I have a talent for making that sort of thing look even more difficult than it really is; anybody watching me would have had endless hours of amusement.

“You must have the shittest job in the world today.” I said. I didn’t even gesture around me, because there was no need.

“I know.” he said, smiling despite himself. He had a pleasant, happy face. I could see that in warmer climes he could have made a mint doing this. The expression said mustn’t grumble, a traditional English value I’ve always been very poor at putting into practice. You can probably tell that yourself by now.

My coin clinked into his tin. The thud of impact seemed to echo all the way across the square like a thunderclap, or maybe it just sounded that way to me.

“The funny thing is, this was the only day I could do over the whole Christmas period. I specifically asked for this day.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I gave it careful thought and said the only thing that seemed appropriate.

“Well, I hope you do really well today. And have a Merry Christmas.”

“Thanks. Merry Christmas to you too.”

As I trod with care down the road towards the station I found myself wondering; why had I done it? Was it because I felt sorry for him, or because I cared about his cause, or just because I wanted to make myself feel like a better person? All those calculations I made in my mind in a second that led to me crossing over, did most people not carry those out? Surely it couldn’t be that; there had been a few other people who completely ignored him in the time I had been there. I could almost imagine their relief that the man in the funny elf suit had found someone else to hassle instead of them.

Then I found myself thinking about something that had happened a few nights back on our team night out from work. We were all in Great Expectations, the Dickens themed chintzy pub near the centre of town, standing round the pool table, pretending we get on better than we do. I was chatting to Miles. He’s from Manchester, much older than us, on his second marriage and his umpteenth house. His shirts are all polycotton, short-sleeved with button down collars, even in the dead of winter, and his holidays – which he takes about four times a year – are always to destinations synonymous with the drug trade. We reckon that’s how he can afford them all. He has a face that looks lived in and a wardrobe that looks slept in, but he’s a good guy.

“You’ve got Barrett’s Disease? I’ve got that too. It’s a fucking pain, I’ve had the camera down me loads of times.”

“Really? How do you find it?”

“Oh, it’s all right now. When I first got it the wife read up on the internet and I had to calm her down, but apart from that it’s fine. The drugs work a treat and when I go to have the camera I ask them to knock me out. They give me that date rape drug and I sleep through the whole thing.” He gives a throaty cackle, a throwback to years of chainsmoking. “Yeah mate, if they offer you some Rohypnol next time you should definitely take it.”

I felt ashamed telling him that it was the other way round for me, that I had had to get Kelly to read up about it all online because I couldn’t be trusted to do it myself. All my medical information comes from Kelly; she’s the one who translates it from “you are going to die” into English. Without her I don’t know how I would manage.

“You know who else has got Barrett’s Disease? Alastair at work.”

The next day I mentioned this to Alastair.

“Yes, I’ve got that. I just take the drugs and see my consultant once a year. It’s fine. It’s funny really, I’ve got very high cholesterol too, so I’m on drugs for that as well.”

“Me too.” I tell him. All these people, with exactly the same problems as me and you’d never know. Because they don’t make a big song and dance about it, or retreat into the depths of their own navels, or write huge solipsistic chunks of prose about what it all means. I remember when my cholesterol was diagnosed, going round telling everybody the world might end. I remember when I got the medication I was convinced there would be awful side effects and that I wouldn’t be able to cope. It’s a wonder nobody tried to kill me before the drugs kicked in.

Most people don’t think about why they give money to charity, they just do it. Most people don’t worry about whether they’re going to get ill, or whether if they are ill if it’s going to get worse, or if they’re going to die. They just get on with things. They trudge through the snow, and they go to work, and they try to have a laugh with their friends and holidays with their spouses and fun with their kids. What’s so special about me that makes me think I’m any different?

At the end of my trip to the station I stood on Platform 4 and waited for my train, not quite sure what I made of it all. Further down from me, in front of the yellow line you are meant to stand behind, a father and his little boy walked up to the platform edge and I watched the man, very deliberately, with the tip of his cheap looking trainer, draw a smiley face in the snow. And I thought that I’m glad there are people that can still have an uncomplicated response to something lovely.

Two stories about Reading (Part 1)

I only really remember two big occasions where my parents sat me down and made an announcement, and both of them changed my life beyond recognition.

One came when I was around sixteen, the weekend after I had finished my GCSE exams. On the Saturday, my father took my brother and me to Glastonbury for the day. We pottered round the shops, took in the Tor and enjoyed a rare day of company together without bickering or falling out. Excursions like that virtually never happened and nor for that matter did harmonious days, but at the time I didn’t really even think about why he was making the effort. I wasn’t too bothered anyway; all the stress of the exams was melting away and I had a whole summer of loafing to look forward to. This was just going to be the first in a series of lazy days. A lot of things only make sense with hindsight, and this was no exception, though normally they don’t become clear quite as soon as the following day.

This one, however, did; my parents sat their two children down on the charmless velour sofa and told us they were divorcing, and nothing was the same after that. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the four of us had an uneasy year ahead of us, forced to continue cohabiting because the house proved almost impossible to sell. Every night, sitting either side of the line between the tectonic plates in our front room, we would niggle and gripe at each other before going upstairs to our bedrooms where, I imagine, my mother and father would lie there, either side of the line between the tectonic plates on the mattress.

The previous announcement changed my life every bit as much, if not more. When I was about eight years old, my parents sat my brother and me down and told us we were leaving Bristol. My dad had got a new job, and we were going somewhere new and exciting that I’d never heard of. It was called Reading.

“It’s next to the M4.” said my dad, by way of explanation. All that conjured up to me was a tiny house tucked under a flyover, walls constantly shaking from the continual throb of traffic.

In reality, we moved to the suburbs and I don’t really remember Reading very much at first. It was a place you went to buy your school uniforms rather than somewhere to soak up the bright lights. And in any case, back then there were no bright lights. This was before chain pubs invaded the high street, when the poshest restaurant in town was the Berni Inn on the corner and the pubs were called The Boar’s Head and The Tudor Tavern and were full of bikers. In the case of the Tudor Tavern there were at least a couple of regulars who might well have remembered the dissolution of the monasteries.

It was only in the summer before university that I started to fall in love with my adoptive home town, mainly because of Hannah. In some ways, it was all her fault. Hannah was one of the first girls I made friends with from school. She had a full length purple coat, small John Lennon spectacles, short hair, a pair of colossal jugs it was difficult to take your eyes off and a tiny mole on her chin which I happened to find quite enchanting. She was sharp, smart, funny and totally convinced that there was nothing she didn't know (in the time since then, I've come to realise that a useful shorthand for that particular collection of adjectives is "my type"). It’s safe to say that everybody fancied her, but I was the one she was friends with.

I used to spend happy evenings round at her house, sitting out on the patio drinking or walking her dog with her in the park after nightfall. I’d have dinner with her and her family, and I always felt welcome. She had a bearded socialist dad who she worshipped. He had a slightly lazy eye and used to fall asleep in his study while listening to Tom Waits. Her mother looked a bit like Maggie Smith and was always lovely to me - I used to be quite well-behaved and shy, back then. I always got the feeling she would have loved her daughter to fancy me but knew perfectly well, because her daughter was just like her, that Hannah never would. The looks she gave me were a complex mixture of sympathy tinged with a suggestion that I might have got off lightly.

Hannah was my induction into Reading life. She and I would catch the number 65 into town and go drinking at the 3Bs, a cellar bar just off the market square. She had gone to Henley College, out of town and an exotic bus ride away every day, and fallen into a new crowd of pink-haired, Doctor Martened women the likes of whom would never have featured at our safe suburban comprehensive. They were a circle of lively, opinionated women, and I was more than happy to go along with her and join in their discussions.

I was Duckie rather than Blane to her, the funny platonic friend, but it was good enough for me. It was one of my first experiences of trying to fit in in surroundings far more sophisticated than me and the eighteen year old me, all bad t-shirts, dodgy trainers and pints of cider and blackcurrant, wouldn’t have realised that it was probably always going to feel a little like that. It was also by no means going to be my last experience of being pigeonholed as the funny platonic friend.

After closing time, Hannah and I would walk all the way home from the centre of town, past the library, down the long road past the technical college, over the junction and past all the gaudy flashing lights of the golden mile of kebab joints, grotty pillars of gristly meat revolving in window after window, along the perimeter of the cemetery and out to the edge of the motorway, next to the industrial parks.

There seemed to be more fields, less flats and less industrial estates back then, because although it ostensibly looks similar, the world was a very different place twenty years ago. And then, gone midnight, in the still of a summer evening, we would climb one of the ladders by the side of the quiet dual carriageway and sit up on one of the signs above the road, feet dangling over the edge, talking for what seemed like forever about all the things we were going to do when we got out of this town. When you’re eighteen, you believe all that Moon River stuff.

Reading only plays a supporting role in this story, it is not the central character. What I really learned from all of this is something different; some friendships last forever, some friendships don’t. And for the ones that don’t, even if you can’t necessarily trace their decline you can usually point to their apex. Ours was that summer - those walks in the park, drinks in the cellar, cups of tea on the patio and climbs up that ladder. Our friendship lasted several years after that, but it never again reached those literal or metaphorical heights. I learned one other thing from Hannah: because I fancied her, I used to borrow records from her. But because I knew she would never fancy me, I only pretended to listen to half of them.

She was true to her word - she eventually got out of Reading and I imagine, like some I went to school with, that she only comes back now at this time of year. She’ll probably step over the tinselled threshold in the next week or so to visit the bearded dad and the fierce, funny mum that I tried so hard to charm half a lifetime ago, husband and kids in tow. I am quite the opposite; no family visits for me this year, just a taxi to an airport and a Christmas Day spent waking up somewhere new with the call to prayer echoing from the minarets. But the rest of the year, I’m still here in Reading. I kept coming back and never quite escaped the way I thought I would, but that’s a different story. Maybe next time.

Transmit and receive

It all starts out so simply, doesn’t it? Form your thoughts into words. Write the words on a page. Press a button, tell the world. Sit back and wait for the world to tell you that you’re amazing.

I’ve never been community spirited. I left the cub scouts because I got bored, my only badge advertising my proficiency at chess. It might as well have just said “WEAKLING” in block capitals with a symbol depicting a matchstick man making a meal of lifting a bag of sugar. I was a cultural misfit too; Akela berated me once after a game of British Bulldog because I had loudly proclaimed that I was “knackered”. She told me in front of all the others that I had been offensive to horses. This was in the Eighties, when nobody thought political correctness had gone mad. In those says, nobody knew what it was and if you said anything even remotely politically correct everybody thought it was you that was mad. At the time Bristol was still recovering from the race riots, and there was far too much that was incorrect in the truest sense going on.

I’ve been ejected from, or ruled myself out of, countless communities ever since. Clubs and me, I’m afraid, have just never got on.

University, for instance: it was a series of cliques I couldn’t get into or didn’t want to. Sometimes I convinced myself that I didn’t want to and that’s why I couldn’t get in, most of the time I knew it had been the other way round. It wasn’t to be the only such experience – the more disastrous ones were those where I tried to participate, be it the internet music forum I spent several years on or the cosy chattering of the Twitter circle I found myself in earlier this year. My modus operandi hasn’t evolved in all that time: I join, I alienate, I leave.

All that has changed is that the exits get more spiteful and spectacular. I never slope off if there’s an opportunity to denounce everybody and leave in a hissy fit, and I’ve never quite figured out that self-immolation is a very different thing from a blaze of glory. “I’m never coming back” I would say, before sneakily doing so from time to time only to realise, to my disappointment, that very few people had noticed and nobody had set up an online book of condolence. Life goes on, just without me, the most important person in the world. How dare they?

What it boils down is my inability to keep my mouth shut, especially when expressing negative opinions. I know that this makes me ill-suited to happy and supportive environments which are all about saying nice things about people, bands or ideas that you love. So on the internet when somebody expresses an opinion, say, about a record you don’t particularly care for I know that the done thing is to remain silent. Really, I do. I completely understand that, and I’m sure hundreds of well-behaved, fully-functioning members of the virtual society do that many times every day whenever they read something they don’t like.

So why can’t I? I’m not sure. Many’s the time when, even as I rationally know I should be sitting on my hands or going to make a cup of tea or letting the moment pass, I still allow my fingers spitefully to flit across the keyboard. Someone has to be the lone dissenter, I tell myself, it’s a valuable social function. Maybe I took the story about the emperor’s new clothes too seriously as a child, perhaps it’s something more fundamental than that which I don’t understand. It could be that I’m just an arsehole.

I have another talent which relates to my community spirit. When I go out to dinner parties (back when that used to happen) wherever I sit I always end up at the perimeter of two conversations, one to my left and one to my right – both fascinating, both hilarious, both completely impossible for me to break in to. It’s happened more times than I can count. It happened at my work Christmas party only last week. It’s happened so often that I find myself stepping away, thinking about it, and finding that it seems to be emblematic of much else.

Never mind, I tell myself. I can retreat to writing, because it’s much more straightforward. Form your thoughts into words. Write the words on a page. Press a button, tell the world. Transmit, transmit, transmit.

I have met a few bloggers, mind you, I tried that too. I had some lovely evenings, but very few led to anything lasting. Eventually they said something I didn’t like, and I said something I couldn’t help, and they became part of the long mounting blacklist of people I no longer speak to. But that’s fine, too. I never really thought I’d make friends out of this. I don’t do clubs.

* * * * *

There’s a woman in our office that everybody calls “Project Ronseal”, because she has the sort of teak permatan where she seems to have been dipped in Ronseal Quick-Drying Woodstain. Everybody hates her. My theory is that she spent so much time brown-nosing senior managers that she had to acquire the tan so nobody could tell she had a proboscis caked in shit. When people find out she’s only forty-five they are astonished. The wizened, pinched face says she’s ten years older but she dresses in the floaty inappropriate trappings of somebody who hasn’t yet blown out thirty candles. She’s got far higher up in our company than she deserves but nowhere near the lofty position she thinks she merits.

The stories I could tell you about her. How she wanders round the office name-dropping on her mobile, totally oblivious to how much we can’t stand her. The way when her boyfriend was made redundant she stormed into the chairman’s office demanding he change his mind. Gemma says she was once in the bathrooms at work at the same time as her and Project Ronseal didn’t wash her hands after going to the toilet. Most of us would sooner sleep with the office transvestite. We are all waiting for the day when her manager sees through her and they finally give her the chop.

Writing about people you don’t like is just far, far too easy. There are paragraphs in this piece I have hacked, chopped and moved around, never quite right, but the two paragraphs above came out right first time, as easy, as natural, as pleasurable as the biggest sneeze in the world. But here’s a challenge for you: try writing something about somebody you like. Not easy, is it? Once you’ve exhausted your good friends “nice”, and “funny”, you’re left clutching for something else. Too straightforward for you? Try writing something about somebody you like when you don’t know them that well, and when you know they are going to read every word you’ve written. That’s a real challenge.

I should start at the beginning, when Kelly and I walk through the door of the French House. Philip and Sharon are sitting in the corner and are already drinking cider, which I take to be a good sign as it’s just gone noon. I recognize them immediately, despite only having seen a couple of photographs of each of them. I don’t think I will ever figure out how that works, but it couldn’t be anyone but them. I wonder if we are as instantly recognizable. In the run-up to the meeting Philip said that he wondered if we would be like moving avatars, which strikes me as a nicely arse-about-face way of describing people in real life.

Of course, I haven’t started at the beginning; I don’t even remember when the beginning was. I think it was when Philip commented on something I wrote, and then so did Sharon, and then I read their writing and I loved it, and so on and so on and somewhere out of nowhere, after almost a year of liking these people on paper the crazy idea of shaking the hands that type the words you like and making contact with the eyes that read the words you typed became a reality. We already know a lot about each other – and over lunch we come to discover just how much and how little that is.

We didn’t talk about it, but they have brought us Christmas presents. I love that, because we brought a gift for them too. Not because we thought they’d buy us something, but because there was something we wanted them to have. How odd that an encounter with people you have never previously met can encapsulate everything that’s right about presents. They have the advantage on us though – their Christmas card to us is written and sealed, ours sits unwritten in my satchel.

The pub is already filling up with its fair share of reprobates, which is exactly how a pub in Soho should be.

“I bet this place is going to be full of characters in no time.” I say. There’s a communal grin because we know that we’re characters too, and we have stories, separately and together, that match anything they have to offer. Over lunch, at the table upstairs, we start sharing them.

So we talk about how nervous Sharon was about coming along, a feeling I totally understand. There are so many things that can go wrong, so many more than can go right. You can be underwhelmed, bored or worst of all indifferent. The person you meet can be indifferent to you. Nobody wants to be a disappointment; if you don’t do clubs, the fear of being blackballed is immense.

Kelly, of course, had no such compunctions. She never looks forward to or dreads anything until the split second when it’s about to happen. Carefree, living in the moment, she will never know those weeks of anticipation and agony. She and Philip are sitting on the same side of the table, the light side, and I sense that he’s the same. It’s hard to imagine anyone feeling grumpy living with Philip. He’s bright, enthusiastic about things. I don’t spend anywhere near enough time with people like that, or maybe I’m usually inoculated against their infectiousness, but it’s working today. Funny how the lucky find exactly what they need.

I could no more tell you what we talked about than what we didn’t. There was a spell at the start where we followed the great unwritten British bylaw which makes you discuss your journey - the route, the distance and duration – but after that nothing seemed to be off the menu. So we talk about how we met, why we write, about where we want to go with it, about our families. We talk about how nobody seems to publish the sort of things we write, and hatch a tentative plan to set up our own website. “It’s got to be about stories” says Philip, gesturing expansively, “whether they’re fiction or nonfiction.” and we all agree. You could almost call it a community if you were swept along by things, and I am.

That makes it sound rather sober, whereas in truth the second bottle had arrived by then and there was so much more laughter than chin-stroking, far more silliness than sombreness. The pork meatballs turn up hand-crimped, long thin nuggets of meat, scatological right down to the slightly pointed ends and we all roar with laughter. They are sitting in a thin pool of tomato sauce like the aftermath of a diabolical kebab.

“They should be served in one of those kidney shaped cardboard bowls like in hospital.” I say, and even Kelly is too tickled to disapprove of me. Then there is a rich vein of humour when we ask Philip to test my theory that all Italian dishes sound more convincing in a Geordie accent by reading them out. “I’m not a Geordie!” he says indignantly, and he’s right of course, but he hams it up none the less and we all dissolve into hysterics. The dessert wine has turned up by then. I was worried they would find it pretentious (I have many friends who would) but they were just as keen on ordering it as we were.

There is no conversation to my left and conversation to my right, just a glorious tangled mess of sentences, each one hot on the heels of the last, and I am always part of it.

After a lengthy, languorous lunch, after the last mouthful of chocolate cake has been polished off and the curly-haired slip of a waiter has handed us our receipts, we spill into the streets and make a beeline for a pub. Philip knows one, he says, from times working in London. Once there, I head to the bar and looking back I can see him and Sharon standing there side by side, arms round one another as if they had only just got together, as if we weren’t looking. I like how the lucky find exactly what they need.

We sit at the back, perched on stools by the flock wallpaper at a table we’d nabbed off a sleepy old man who had finished poring through the racing form. The nearby table is full of a Christmas party which looks like the nerdiest stag do you could imagine, all geeks with festive hats and deely-boppers. One of them, the chap with huge Elton John spectacles, looks so amazing that I go out of my way to congratulate him, though it could have been the dessert wine. If I’d had more courage I would have taken photographs. As it is, I only have one photograph on my camera, taken in the restaurant, of Philip. He has a manic grin as he holds a miniscule wineglass in the palm of his hand, and the overall effect is more than slightly Ray Harryhausen.

Once ensconced, we talk some more. The conversation just feels like a segment of a conversation which had started a long time ago and will conclude a long time in the future. And I hope I’m not fooling myself, but I think maybe it is. We even talk about a next time. I could no more tell you what we talked about than what we didn’t.

Eventually the evening, which was always going to end too soon, ends too soon. The four of us stroll down Charing Cross Road, past St Martin-in-the-Fields. We just about manage to prevent Sharon from breaking into song - a throwback to a childhood marked by annual visits there, or it could have been the last pear cider. And then we say goodbye at Trafalgar Square. I see their retreating backs and I have the sort of warm feeling I normally associate with people I know much better; that a couple I really like, who are right for each other, are going back to their home together. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll eventually know them better and that feeling won’t be quite so incongruous.

“That was lovely, wasn’t it?” says Kelly, as we make our way through the subway to the Underground station.

“It was brilliant. I really hope they enjoyed it too. I hope they liked us.” I said. This caring what people think stuff is tricky, I so often don’t that when I do I’m not quite sure how to cope with it.

“I hope they did too. Come on, let’s head home.”

Now I’m home. The occupational hazard of spending a day with a trio of writers is that they all write about the experience too and they already have. You can see what they wrote here, here and here, if you want to . I’m the last person to turn phrases and gestures into sentences and paragraphs. But that’s fine with me because I’m just almost doing what I always do: forming my thoughts into words, writing the words on a page, hitting a button and telling the world. Transmit, receive, transmit, receive.

Various answers

[Blue Italics of Housekeeping: Technically this one is a re-post of an piece which originally appeared at The Eternal Worrier. He's one of my favourite bloggers and back in September he asked me to do an interview on his site. He asked me some interesting questions - about writing, about anonymity, about Reading and about pork scratchings. Really, all of my favourite things in one handy bundle.

I'm reprinting it for a few reasons. First of all, I quite like having all my writing in one place and I thought this might have a wide enough appeal that it was worth publishing on my own blog. Secondly, it's got a section on my advice for new bloggers which might be of interest to new bloggers, or controversial to longstanding bloggers. I know at least one person took exception to a few of my suggestions; perhaps we can get a heated debate going in the comments section. Finally, I have some readers now who I didn't have three months ago (hello all of you!) and I thought you might like it.]

In your first blog post you mentioned that you were originally going to keep a diary but then decided to blog. Do you think you would have written such high quality work in a personal diary?

It's very kind of you to say.

I don't know about that, but I think I would have written something very different. I suppose that's the point - and something I think some bloggers miss - that writing only really works if it has an audience and some idea of who that audience is. Writing inwardly might be fabulous therapy but I don't think at the end of that process it makes for a satisfactory read. And actually, I'm not sure it even makes for very effective therapy either. To some extent having to package up your experiences in prose and explain them to somebody else can be far more useful. After all, if you can make something make sense to other people, maybe somewhere along the way it will make more sense to you too.

That's sort of wandered off the point. I suppose a shorter answer would be to say No, I don't think I would have. I think it would have degenerated into repetitive introspective whinging. I can't be absolutely certain, but the volumes of hardbound notebooks under the bed - my Collected Miseries 1991-2001 - suggest that I'm probably right. I can't imagine reading them again without cringing, but I hope what I write in my blog might stand the test of time slightly better than that.

Do any of your friends or co-workers know about your blog?

Actually quite a few do. The vast majority of the people I write about at work are well aware of the blog and some of them read it. Some instead pretend to read it and then twitch nervously as if they're worried I'm going to set them a short written exam. At first, I sort of wanted them to read it and now it would sometimes make my life easier if they didn't.

"You're not allowed to use that." one of them will say, shortly after describing their partner's sexual performance as "quite competent, thank you" or accidentally filling out an online questionnaire which suggests that they ought to vote for the British National Party at the next election. And at times like that I find myself wishing none of them knew and I could just write what I liked without fear of repercussions. But it's an oddly symbiotic relationship; sometimes they tell me stories in the full knowledge that they might get immortalised in print. Not just that, but they all seem oddly chuffed when they feature in a blog post.

The strangest one is my friend Gemma who I work with. Her mother and sister have both been passed the link and occasionally read it, which made matters somewhat awkward when I wrote up that story about Gemma having sex in a communal jacuzzi. I would say 'well, you live and learn' but on the balance of evidence it seems I rarely do.

Friends are more complex. I would say most of them don't read it, something which slightly offended me early on and is now a colossal relief. The frustration however comes from going out of an evening with a friend who does read it.

"Well, I already know what you've been up to." they often say as we take our seats in a restaurant and it's hard to know how to respond to that. I could explain that it's only a representation of one side of my life, or ask them what they made of it, but the former is excessively complicated and the latter sounds a lot like fishing for compliments. I sometimes worry that some of my friends would sooner read the blog than actually see me in person.

My one regret is that my family have access to my blog and I wish quite a few of them didn't. I'm not currently in touch with some of my family, and it can be disconcerting that they can find out what I'm up to when I wouldn't necessarily choose for them to have that information. Blogging (or writing, I guess) can lead us to make all sorts of complicated decisions about our public and private personae, and sometimes we don't so much make a decision as drift into something. It's worth bearing in mind.

Was it a conscious decision to have an anonymous/public blog?

Not really, no. I suppose I didn’t want to openly blog under my real name because I occasionally write about stuff which happens at work. That’s very different to writing about work per se or my actual job which I’ve never done, partly because I want to keep my job and perhaps just as importantly because I’d quite like to keep my readers. But having said that, there’s not a huge amount of anonymity in my blog - it’s pretty easy for people to find out who I am and I tend to respond to any mails I get in my real name, which does somewhat blow my cover.

The one time this caused me real problems was when I had an article published earlier this year. Should I publish under my blogging pseudonym, publish under my real name and link to the blog or just publish under my real name and not mention the blog? It was a really hard decision and in the end I went for the latter. It was a pity in terms of forgoing blog traffic, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see my real name in print and, being the nervous type, I had a horrible image of my HR department suddenly going through the whole blog with a fine toothed comb and pulling me into one of those meeting rooms with no windows from which Nobody Ever Returns.

One day I went into work and my friend Sarah was showing someone the article as I wandered over.

“What a coincidence!” she said, “This article was written by someone with the same name as you.”

It seems I needn’t have bothered.

What advice would you give to the new blogger or amateur writer who is just about to put pen to paper/finger to laptop

I’m really not sure how helpful my advice is going to be. Before offering any, I should probably start with the caveat that my blog and the way I write probably go against any rules of thumb I’m about to give. Also, I suppose there’s advice for bloggers, advice for people who want to write and the things I wish I’d known when I was starting. It’s possible to be a blogger without being too fussed about being a writer, and there’s no shame at all in that if that’s what you want to do. Also I’ve reread my advice about three times now and it still makes me come across as a bit of a wanker. I’m sorry about that, really I am, but it is what I think so I can’t help that.

So in terms of blogging, first of all think hard about who is going to read your posts. If you’re just writing for yourself that’s all well and good but if so don’t feel discouraged if you don’t get a response or comments. But if you want other people to read your stuff, never forget to think hard about how it will appeal to them. How would your posts read to somebody who didn’t know you? Would they really get what you’re talking about? Why would they come back?

There are also some basics which I think probably make sense whether you see yourself as a blogger or a writer or both. I might make myself unpopular for saying these, but here goes anyway:

1. Block capitals - just don‘t. There is no blog equivalent of holding the receiver a long way away from your ear, and quite a few people will just hit the X button at the top right of the screen instead.

2. The same goes for exclamation marks. Exclamation marks are like swear words - now and again for emphasis is great but if you use them all the time you just sound like a congenital idiot. I used to work with a guy who used exclamation marks so often in his work emails that we thought his keyboard must be malfunctioning. It made some of his emails when he was delivering bad news sound incongruously jaunty, to the extent where we started to wonder if he was a bit special. While we’re on the subject, there is a special circle of Hell for people who use multiple exclamation marks.

3. Centre aligning text or having it all in italics or - dear God no - both at once is not going to do you any favours.

4. Don’t use semicolons if you don’t know how to. Better still, learn how to because they’re very useful if you ever plan to write long sentences. I wouldn’t be without them, myself.

5. Leave a line between paragraphs. Readers need to have things broken up for them. If you have a lot of blog posts in your reader and you see one that’s just a huge smear of unformatted text it would have to be written by the best writer in the world for readers to wade through it. I wish I could wave a magic wand and give every writer the readers they deserve, but it looks unlikely to happen any time soon. So in the meantime, give them all the help you can.

6. Similarly, long paragraphs are just an act of cruelty. And while we’re on the subject, so are short sentences. Like this. All the time. And worse still is the horrible affection I see in blog posts now and again. I’m talking about. One. Word. Sentences.

7. First sentences and closing paragraphs are very important. Just pop over to my blog and see how often I ignore this rule. You need to draw people into what you’ve written, and when you read a blog post that doesn’t have a neat strong ending it’s almost as frustrating as those moments when you think you are about to sneeze and then nothing comes out.

Then I suppose there’s the cultural stuff. First of all, don’t be discouraged. If you write good stuff, and you pop onto blogs that you like and you leave good interesting comments, people will come over to your place. Good quality always stands out a mile on the internet. Do find blogs you like and hang around them. It can seem like an uphill struggle at first but then at some point you’ll see this community that you’ve somehow become part of and you’ll find yourself thinking Where did you all come from? and that’s a lovely feeling.

At the start it’s very tempting to write a post every day. If you give in to that temptation, in the early stages you will put out loads of stuff which comparatively few people will read. That was one of my biggest mistakes when I started out. By all means write, write, write - but keep something in reserve. Post every other day, for example. What that means is that you’ll have some backup in terms of things you can post further down the line and you won’t be worrying that your best stuff is loitering in the depths of your archives. Because, sad but true, most people when they find a blog they like don’t go and check out all the back issues, much as it would be lovely if they did.

Oh, and if you have nothing to say on any given day, please please please don’t write a post saying so. I did that early on, it’s the white noise of the blogosphere and they’re never worth reading (mine certainly weren’t).

One last thing - the sort of things you write will change over time. You might find yourself trying the kind of writing a few months down the line that you would never have considered early on. This is one of the wonderful things about writing regularly, and you should embrace it. Never think “Oh, I have to write this sort of thing because it’s the sort of thing I write and what people have come to expect” because then you have backed yourself into a cul-de-sac that’s never going to end well. Some of the most beautiful posts I’ve read by other people have come out of nowhere and in the comments they always say “I really deliberated about whether to put this up, because it’s not what I do”, only for everyone else to say “Who cares? I loved it.”

Do you have any writing rituals (a particular place, notepad, time of the day)?

I wish. I’ve always felt like I’m missing out not having any rituals, somehow they seem to mark you out as a Proper Writer. You know, I always write in the study on a Sunday afternoon or I do everything in my Moleskine notebook or the like. But the truth is I don’t; my blog posts are a real mishmash. Some of them are bashed out in the evenings on my laptop, some are knocked up in stolen moments in my lunch break, some get scribbled into notebooks outside cafes and some are tapped away on the iPhone standing waiting outside WH Smiths. Some come out cleanly in one go and some come out in bits and pieces, some are easy and some are difficult (that makes them sound like bowel movements, doesn‘t it? Sorry about that). Some I start, walk away from swearing furiously, come back to a fortnight later and realise I quite like them after all.

It’s not just blog posts, I find that some sentences and images are like that too. Sometimes a sentence I want to use will pop into my head and bounce round it desperately looking for a paragraph to belong in. I usually make a note of those on my iPhone. They’re a bit like cute dogs in the pound; it might take me a day, a week or a month to find them somewhere to live but I always make sure I do.

You often mention your home town of Reading in your blog posts, but is there anywhere else, any major world city where you would like to live for just one year?

Loads! I'm an unashamed fan of cities in general and can only begin to imagine how inspiring they are to live in if you're even remotely creative. Also, big cities seem to have quite a vibrant blogging scene which can present lots of opportunities, whether it’s street photographers in New York or food bloggers in London. Somehow, much as I dearly love my home town and it still retains the capacity to impress and delight me, I don't think it will ever have the same draw or the same kind of community of writers; not unless you all fancy relocating, anyway.

My problem would be in narrowing the choice down to one single city. Would it be Lisbon for the trams, the tottering buildings perched on steep hills, the egg custards and the port? Or perhaps Montreal for the restaurants, the street culture and the glorious open spaces? Then I think that I've missed out Brighton, one of my favourite places in the whole wide world. Narrow lanes full of curious boutique shops, headphoned scenesters and every kind of restaurant and cafe you could care to name. Galleries seemingly all over the place, in a city where you can't go ten paces without seeing a fresh photo opportunity. Plus, of course, the sea and, in my case, plenty of happy memories, because I got married there.

I haven't even mentioned Prague, Amsterdam or Bristol. Like I said, I'm quite an aficionado of cities.

In the end though, I couldn't look beyond Paris. I try to go there every year and I'm at my very happiest in the heart of the Marais, sitting out on the pavement of rue Vielle du Temple with a carafe of red in front of me and all the people watching possibilities anybody could hope for. Living out there, writing books, soaking it all up... it's the sort of pipe dream lottery tickets were invented for. I don't think any of the blog posts I have written about Paris have anywhere near done it justice.

In the meantime, Reading is coming along nicely. It doesn't quite have a blogging scene yet, but you could do a lot worse if you’re looking for somewhere new to live.

You have a unique writing style but are there any writers that have influenced that form?

That might be for other people to say, really. I am, in fact, horrendously badly read. The classics tend to bore me to tears, and popular fiction doesn’t do a lot for me either. So I don’t know what writers have influenced me, I’m not sure that any have. Perhaps I’ve read so little there hasn’t been much scope for me to absorb things from anyone else.

In terms of writers I really enjoy, I love Anne Tyler and Barbara Pym, two very different novelists but both of whom write about characters that feel real and behave in ways that are utterly plausible; the sort of books which maybe shouldn’t be interesting but somehow are. I love the prose style of Maile Meloy though I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, want to write like that myself. In terms of non-fiction I quite like Augusten Burroughs and I think David Sedaris’ stuff is pleasant enough (though I don’t quite get what the hysteria is all about).

You can choose only one: Which is your best piece of work so far (For me it is The Vaseline story)?

That’s the most unfair question in the whole interview. I couldn’t possibly say which is the best, just which is my favourite. Usually my favourite is the one I’ve just posted, closely followed by the one I’m posting next. But that sort of transient pleasure aside, it changes all the time. I suppose if I had to pick one right now, it would probably be one I wrote mostly when I was on holiday in Greece called Other people. I was feeling a bit disillusioned writing about myself at the time, and starting to beat myself up about the fact that I couldn’t write fiction and I really enjoyed pinning fictitious stories on real people I saw during my travels.

Naturally, if you asked me next week, it would be something else.

What you have called your blog if you had lived in Cherry Blossom Close?

Christ alone knows. Funnily enough there is a blogger called “The Girl From Cherry Blossom Street” and I bet that isn’t her address either. I’m glad I don’t have to even consider that, but I don’t think I’m the sort of person to live in Cherry Blossom Close anyway. It doesn’t sound like my kind of place. I don’t think it would have an eighties nightclub, a fairtrade bar, a Christian bookshop, a shop called the “Knob Shop” and an estate agent called ‘Vanderpump & Wellbelove’ on it like my beloved London Street does (and no, I’m not making this up). I’m also glad my blog title doesn’t contain the word “ramblings”. I’ve never understood why so many blogs do - it’s not exactly the mother of all sales pitches, is it?

What’s your favourite drink in the pub?

I’m glad you qualified this question because, much as I like a tipple, it’s a very venue dependent thing. At home it's usually wine. In a bar it's got to be gin and tonic, or a Bloody Mary if I’m confident they'll do a good one. You have to be certain that they have the same definition of “a bit spicy” as you do, for instance, something I learned from a rather uncomfortable hour spent in an otherwise lovely bar in Oxford totally unable to feel my lips. But in pubs, for me at least, it has to be cider. Just one sip of the sparkly amber goodness on a summer afternoon and the world immediately seems an infinitely kinder place.

Would you get nuts or crisps with that?

I find myself popping to the pub after work quite a bit lately. My friend Mikey and I will step off the funbus and head for the Allied Arms, a pub in Reading with a fabulous beer garden and sun trap right in the middle of town. We'll grab a couple of pints, I'll chuck a quid on the jukebox (which manages to turn eclecticism into an art form - where else could you hear "Camouflage" by Stan Ridgway, "Wichita Lineman" by Glenn Campbell and "Where's Me Jumper?" by Sultans of Ping F.C. back to back?) and we'll talk nonsense about all sorts.

I did go through a phase of enjoying pork scratchings - a rather Teutonic snack of crunchy pork rind and soft dubious pork fat all enclosed in a tiny foil lined body bag. That phase ended when I bought a packet which violated one of my golden rules: namely never to eat anything which looks as if you probably ought to shave it first. Once I’ve forgotten just how bristly one of those pork scratchings was I’ll probably give them another go, so in a couple of months perhaps.

So at the moment, with pork scratchings off the menu, it's all about roast beef flavoured Monster Munch. For the uninitiated, they're like fractal shaped lumps of styrofoam dusted with a roughly meat flavoured brown powder which has been mixed with crack. We buy a packet, open it up, stick it on the rickety table between us and they‘re gone in seconds. I call it pub tapas. Can't beat it.

Last question: You are locked in a wardrobe with either a wounded badger or an angry clown. Which would you pick?

Wounded badger, every time. I feel uncomfortable enough being in the same building as a clown, I think a wardrobe would just tip me over the edge.

Kiosk

The small kiosk, gleaming signs and curved edges, is at the very epicentre of the concourse. You could be forgiven, looking at its squat certainty, for thinking that it had always been there and that they decided to build the train station around it. It stands with its back flush against the departures board, as if they are about to have a duel to the death. At half past eight, commuters whirl past it, on their way to the ticket machines or rushing off to their platform, like pilgrims circling the Kaaba. They are all heading somewhere unimportant to make the money they need so they can return home to somewhere important. I wonder if they miss their beds as badly as I miss mine, if they had a goodbye like mine that morning, if they have somebody to say goodbye to at all.

There are two windows, one either side of the bill of fare - a list of destinations easily as appealing as those on the departures board - and behind the counter there is just enough room for four diminutive dervishes. Two, almost hidden from view, frantically make the drinks; heating milk, measuring out coffee, firing water through beans with an efficiency I won’t even approach when I have been at work for a couple of hours and have properly woken up. The other two are the front of house - taking the orders, taking the money, orchestrating everything, completely in control.

I approach it most mornings and pick my queue carefully so that I’m served by Natanong. She is the second person I speak to most days, and she knows my usual drink without me needing to ask. I’m not the only one, I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to fall into the category of Natanong’s regulars and it’s amazing that she never gets one wrong. Given that, at that time in the morning, I can barely remember what I had for dinner the night before and what’s in my diary for the day ahead, I am always disproportionately impressed by this. Someone with a memory like that could be hugely successful. They could be dangerous. I sometimes suspect that Natanong could do my job without breaking a sweat, but I wouldn’t have a hope of doing hers.

Earlier that week there had been Christmas music playing in the kiosk. Imagine that, Christmas music on all the time at work, when you’ve started work at a time when most right-minded people are still unconscious, playing a tug of war with their partners, turf wars over the duvet, a more precious quantity than ever in this terrible cold spell. Natanong told me once that she starts work around five. “We bake all our pastries fresh every day.” she said. She sounded really proud of who she works for, and I felt a bit sheepish contrasting that with my lunch breaks when we all whinge about our bosses, about our malfunctioning Blackberries, about not getting a bonus this year. What it must be like to work for an employer you love, to be bought into a brand you can believe in. I hope they appreciate her.

“Don’t you get sick of this music?” I asked her, in an attempt to build solidarity.

“Not at all. Christmas is a big festival in Thailand, too.”

If I make her sound like a Pollyanna then I’ve failed; if she was like that I wouldn’t have bothered talking to her at all. If the second person I spoke to every morning was that chirpy I would be buying my morning coffee elsewhere. I’ve always wanted to watch a sequel to Pollyanna where the eponymous heroine winds up on crack on a council estate somewhere. No, she’s just really nice; one of those rare people who is done an enormous disservice by the way that the word “nice” has been ruined through overuse, because it’s still the adjective that fits best.

On Thursday morning, she was nowhere to be seen so I picked a window and waited patiently in the queue. The person serving was someone I hadn’t seen before and I took off my headphones, ready to ask for what I wanted as if this was my first time, as if I hadn’t been coming here for ages. And then, to my right, I saw a tiny blue blur. There she was, haring out of nowhere, carrying an enormous box of sandwiches and loading up the displays, juggling ciabattas and pretzels. She was dwarfed by a full length puffa jacket, almost down to the floor. Timberland, I noted.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning. This happens every day, every day they arrive at this time. The busiest time!”

“I like your coat.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s huge! It’s more like a sleeping bag than a coat.”

She smiles. Some mornings I feel like I’m getting the hang of this.

My coffee turns up and I have to ask for the lady behind the counter to sprinkle it with both chocolate and cinnamon. Some people, of course, would have already known that. “Thank you, have a good day” I say as it is handed to me. I always say that, unless it’s Natanong in which case I say “Have a lovely day.” For some reason a good day just doesn’t seem good enough for her. I noticed once that the slogan Have a lovely day! was printed at the bottom of the drinks menu. I’m not sure which came first, but I like to think I was saying it before they printed it. Nobody wants to feel like subliminal advertising works, or not on them anyway.

There are coffee kiosks like this in train stations across the country and I’ve tried plenty of them. I’ve shivered in the cold on the platform at Streatham Common, ungloved hands hugging my gingerbread latte, waiting for the half-hourly train, looking over at the giant white slabs of polystyrene foam piled up on the opposite side of the tracks like supersized feta cheese. I’ve picked up a cappuccino from Peter, the bespectacled Eastern European barista who makes beautiful coffee but looks like his dog just died, in the gloomy underpass at Temple Meads while waiting for the last connection home, tired and emotional from visiting my aunt in hospital. But for my money, the finest in the world is in my beloved home town, and I have a pretty good idea why.

Watlington Street

The walk back from the acupuncturist took me down Watlington Street, one of my favourite little streets in Reading. At one end is the Lyndhurst, a lovely place and possibly the closest my home town comes to a gastropub. Kelly and I used to be a regular fixture at their Sunday night quiz which is presided over by Helen, a formidable lady in a rugby shirt with a hairstyle like that of a cartoon character. The best nights were the Sundays before a bank holiday, because those were the nights when Helen could get drunk with impunity and you were never quite sure whether she’d make it to the end of the quiz without mangling a tricky place name or tongue-twisting question. None of us minded, of course, we’d just fetch more pints of cider and more prawn crackers from the bar and scratch our head over the sheet of mysteries in front of us, dreading the moment when they - and our ignorance - were revealed.

Nowadays, I tend to stop in there on Tuesdays, straight off the bus, with half an hour to kill before my regular weekly appointment. It’s odd going to a pub on your own; you feel simultaneously joined up with and apart from a whole community playing out in front of your eyes. Tables of colleagues, enjoying a bottle of wine between them before returning to their homes and lives, a reminder that other people’s routines can be a lot like yours. In summer, you can sit out front and watch the world bustling past, on a race to finish your cider before the blazing sun warms it up and makes it undrinkable. It’s winter now and the corners of the windows are embellished with fake snow, a detail I should find annoying but which instead lends a comforting, almost Victorian touch. It’s the first place I remember seeing Christmas lights without feeling irritated, and I’m always sorry when I have to collect up my thoughts and my belongings and leave.

Next to the Lyndhurst are the gorgeous miniature terraced houses, all brightly coloured front doors surrounded by beautiful checkerboard brickwork. Something about those houses always makes me feel that the lives behind those doors are so much bigger than the tiny front rooms they are crammed into; wishful thinking perhaps, but I can’t imagine that such a pretty street couldn’t be full of interesting stories. Walking down it on a Saturday morning I remembered one house in particular further up, past the imposing stone of the Sacred Heart Polish Church and the haphazard chaos in the window of the upholsterers that never seems to be open. I used to have a friend from university called Eric, and had a sister who used to live in one of those houses with her boyfriend. The boyfriend in question used to be a submariner, and it’s anyone’s guess whether that little house constituted any more room than he was used to.

Kelly and I visited Eric there once, it might have been the last time I saw him, and he showed us his wedding photos. They were taken in a stunning Scandinavian summerhouse, something straight out of an arthouse film, and I remember being struck that the camera lies all the time. Their wedding looked striking, stylish and poetic, and yet he was one of the most prosaic people I’ve ever met. My wedding photos on the other hand are a low-budget classic, a handful of grainy black and white prints taken by my friend Laura. I don’t think that, before the day of our wedding, she had ever used an SLR before. But it doesn’t matter because some of the magic that was floating around that day crept into the lens; I like the film they seem to be stills from, and I always have.

The reason I remember that house is that a few months later we were walking past it and I said to Kelly “This is Watlington Street. Did you know that Eric’s sister used to live there?”

It’s a rare event that my memory is worse that Kelly’s, in fact this may be the only recorded instance of it.

“Of course I know. I was there, with you. Eric showed us his wedding photographs. Don’t you remember?”

To my shame, I didn’t. But then, as it passed into legend, it became a recurring joke and every time we went along that street I would look over at Kelly and say “Ah, this is Watlington Street. Interesting story about that, actually.” and then Kelly would have to feign ignorance while I told her about it all over again. This joke has been running for years - for the first six months or so it was only funny to the two of us, and I suspect now it’s only funny to me but it never stops me dusting it off when the opportunity arises.

It’s not the only running joke though, our marriage is full of them. I bet all marriages are. For example, whenever we head for a play or a train station or a holiday Kelly will say “You’ve got the tickets, haven’t you?” I never have; I’m never entrusted with the tickets. I know that, she knows that, but it’s a defining stamp of our day-to-day existence that Kelly regularly tries and fool me into thinking that it was my job to look after them and I’d neglected my duties in some way. So when we get out of the car and head for the supermarket Kelly, without fail, will say “You’ve got the shopping list, right?” and I will say “You always do this.” “I know,” she’ll reply, “but it wouldn’t be a trip to the shops if I didn’t, would it?” And there remains no answer to that.

Similarly, whenever Kelly tries to talk me into something it takes a very long time. I am stubborn, and change resistant and there’s always something more important to think about than Kelly’s suggestion - something critical like what to have for dinner that night, whether I’ve put on weight, or if the latest symptoms I’m suffering from are likely to turn out to be fatal. But although Kelly loses some battles, she never loses the war. Another running joke comes whenever I capitulate, because I always do at some stage. When that happens, I turn to her and say “I can’t believe it took so long for me to talk you into doing x” and she always pauses, smiles, says “Apology accepted” and that is that.

Sometimes I think these running jokes grease the wheels of all the social interaction I do. It’s comforting, for instance, to know that when I go into work there will be banter about Iain being legendarily well-endowed - something he never complains too much about - or having gone to an extremely posh school (we still think it may well have been Hogwarts) or that when we go to lunch I will be ribbed for the fact that I have a bit of a yen for Ingrid, the rather fetching blonde with the big nose who usually sits a couple of tables along from us and clearly has no idea that I exist.

It is a fine line though, and sometimes I cross it. I had a clear illustration of this last week. One of my running jokes is that I think Gemma ought to wear a suit more often. This is dressed up as a well-meaning suggestion that Gemma should take a more professional approach to her work, but is actually motivated by the fact that I am a big fan of women in suits. Gemma, of course, knows this and tends to grin and bear it. In an office with a different culture, she would probably have approached HR by now. One afternoon Gemma and I were in the kitchen along with Sarah, the fragrant PA who was wearing a very fetching trouser suit.

“Sarah, I’ve got a question for you.”

Sarah sighed. Gemma did likewise, seconds before intervening.

“What he’s going to say next, Sarah, is this. He’s going to say ‘It’s really nice to see you making an effort and wearing a suit. Don’t you think Gemma should wear a suit more often, Sarah?’ because he keeps going on at me about it.”

She couldn’t have been more accurate if she had been reading my dialogue off an autocue, which was a very disturbing experience. Had Gemma discovered the ability to read minds? Surely not. Surely if she had she would have slapped me by now.

“Am I that predictable? You make me sound like some kind of two-dimensional pervert.”

“Yes, you are that predictable.” said Gemma, with a slightly disgusted expression I like to refer to as her ‘Bracknell face’. Another running joke, that, because I can’t help myself.

“Don’t worry though.” said Sarah, twinkling slightly (although it might well have been pity). “You are a perv, but you’re an approachable one.”

This has been a problem for me all my life. “One of these days your mouth is going to get you in real trouble” is something people have been saying to me ever since I learned my first words, and although I’m still waiting for it to happen I do get a sense these days that I am on the last of my nine lives. I’ve never been able to gauge when I’ve gone too far and a joke isn’t funny any more. I’m always the last person to drop it, the last person to clock everybody else rolling their eyes. You can’t rely on me for much, but you can count on me to milk a joke until its udders are in bleeding tatters.

So why do I still do it? I don’t know. There are lots of things I don’t know. For one, I don’t know whether I find all these running jokes a reassuring shorthand, a code that connects us. Feeling like you are all in on a shared joke is a wonderfully bonding thing; much, much more than having watched the same soap opera or having listened to the same three-minute melodic slices of emptiness on the radio. It’s a bespoke belonging that you make yourselves, and that’s where its beauty lies. We’re all part of a club, of a gang, and I’ve been looking for that feeling all my life.

But I’m drawn to the flipside, the dark side; maybe it’s just laziness. Maybe all that call and response is an alternative to genuine connection instead, a way we can all skim across the surface of one another’s lives without ever finding anything out which might make us feel changed or uncomfortable. I worry, too, that perhaps life is largely made up of conversations you’ve had before hundred of times and a series of things people say to one another when neither of them is really thinking or listening. So the occasional important thing, big discussion or horrible tragedy comes along and blindsides you when your mind is elsewhere and you aren’t paying attention, and often you don’t realise what’s important until it’s too late.

Recently I’ve been more and more worried about repeating myself, because that strikes me as the most boring way to be boring of all. I even feel like I’ve said this before, or something a lot like it. It’s one thing telling a running joke, another altogether if you become one. But standing there in the cold, the pub on the corner getting ready to open for lunch, I thought about it: if I properly stopped to consider how much of my life is spent on autopilot I don’t think I would like the answer. Or maybe we all do, and I’m one of the lucky ones because I passed by those beautiful multicoloured doors on my way home, my memory jogged for no reason, and figured that out.

Floral

I thought when I got married that nothing would change. After all, I didn’t get married in order to formalise our relationship; we’d only been together seven months when we did the deed and it always felt much more about acknowledging what we’d known from the start, that this was it.

In this, as in so many things, I completely missed the point.

What I didn’t realise was that after only seven months there was still an awful lot that was changing, almost every week. Not changing things, you see, is the province of people who have been together long enough to have something settled. By contrast, we had only lived together for two months by the time we got married; long enough to work out whether we had the same rough definitions of terms like "clean" and "tidy" and possibly sufficient time to reach agreement on crucial matters like toilet seat etiquette (always down), toilet roll etiquette (the sheet hanging down at the front, not the back) and toilet door etiquette (open if you aren’t using the toilet, closed but not locked if it’s a number one, closed and locked if it’s a number two). Beyond that, everything was up for grabs. In reality if things hadn’t changed following our nuptials, something would have gone badly awry.

The whole subject of change in general is an interesting one where marriage is concerned, something I appreciate a lot better nearly seven years on. It’s one thing saying “I don’t want things to change”, another entirely to say "There is nothing about you that I’d change." We all have to say that, and we’re all lying. Personally, I’d dearly love it if my wife could read a book in bed for more than ten minutes without passing out, drink coffee, tolerate coriander, listen to the radio and read at the same time or stay up until two in the morning at weekends watching movies. But, of course, there’s nothing about her I’d change. In turn, she would very much like me to quit drinking coffee, go to sleep at a decent hour, start dancing, stop moping and feeling sorry for myself so much and lose the urge to undergo giant projects ten minutes before bedtime. She’d also quite like it if I didn’t tell quite so many off colour jokes, particularly ones about children. Naturally, she wouldn’t alter a single thing about me either.

The agenda is a bit more obvious, though, when it comes to my personal appearance. Not always mind you; sometimes it’s only announced after the fact. "No, you don’t need to lose any weight" for example, was repeated with reassuring regularity for years: until I did, after which it transformed in next to no time into "You look so much nicer now you’re slimmer", like the ugly duckling in reverse. But most of the time it’s many things but never subtle. "I wish you’d get a proper haircut", she’ll say, or "Wouldn’t it be nice if you wore jeans that actually fitted you for a change?" She has to say it again and again because it takes months to sink in, and when it does I pretend it was my idea all along.

Similarly, if she decides she doesn’t like an item of clothing it is slowly but surely phased out. Not for her all those heavy-handed old-fashioned methods like accidental red wine spillages, hacking off sleeves or making sure they find their way into a black bin liner bound for a charity shop frequented by the needy and impecunious. Instead it’s just made clear, with increasing frequency and decreasing temperature that it is no longer considered an appropriate object to be seen wearing in public. The huge grey woolly hooded top I used to be so proud of was the first to go. "I’m so glad you decided to get rid of that, it looked like a blanket." she subsequently said, and I said "Me too" - both of us persisting in the shared delusion that it had been my choice.

Who else’s choice could it possibly have been, given that there is nothing about me she would change?

That makes it sound sinister, and honestly it’s not. But I do get a lot of gentle encouragement, and I find that over the last year the way I dress has been changing. There are still jeans - not chinos, I pray to God there will never be chinos – but they fit me better and, to my chagrin, she feels vindicated. There are polo shirts, and cardigans and even shirts, previously something I would only have worn if I was being paid money to be somewhere surrounded by other people who were also wearing shirts. I haven’t bought a slogan t-shirt in ages; now I come to think of it, the turning point might have been the time when she advised me against purchasing a navy blue number with the words "UNCLE WITH BENEFITS" on the front. "Not because it’s in poor taste," she was at pains to point out to me, "but because it’s just not very funny."

The other milestone was a month ago when I picked up the tweed jacket; deep green with the faintest of red lines and those faux leather buttons I’d previously never seen the point of. I went out to dinner with her and my friend Laura wearing a cardigan, my tweed jacket and jeans that fitted and walking through the mall, past the glass shop fronts, I caught the reflection of somebody but I wasn’t sure it was me any more. It was someone I wanted to be instead, a grown-up.

Here is another thing that changes when you get married even though you don’t think it ever will: your capacity to make independent decisions. I really have no idea when this happened, because I am nothing if not an opinionated man. I have an opinion about pretty much everything, and when I don’t it’s usually because I haven’t got round to thinking about something for the two minutes it would take me to form one. But for some reason, once you’ve been married long enough having an opinion is no longer sufficient; it becomes difficult to do anything without knowing your spouse’s.

"What’s the weather like out, should I wear a coat?" is a prime example. I ask this practically every morning despite the fact that, as far as I am aware, I’m not married to a meteorologist but to a mere mortal who has no supernatural powers and access to all the same information as me. She even looks out of the same window before telling me. But it’s not just me. "I’m going to the supermarket at lunchtime, what vegetables should I pick up for tonight?" is a question I am regularly asked. "Surprise me", it transpires, is not an acceptable response. It’s not even true; if she did come home bearing a Jerusalem artichoke I wouldn’t have the first idea what to do with it.

Sometimes the degree of consultation can be a bit too much. If I had five pounds for every time Kelly asked me "Where are you going?" the answer would probably be “I don’t know - possibly the Caribbean, possibly Rome. The world’s my oyster, given that I’m so rich I need never work again”. But most of the time it is a hugely comforting thing. It’s lovely to feel that we’re in it together and that I don’t have to struggle with the important decisions on my own. Important decisions like - and here is where the twin threads of improving my dress sense and my inability to make decisions alone converge - whether to buy the floral shirt.

It happened, as so many things do, by accident. We had popped into Marks and Spencer on a Saturday afternoon so that Kelly could use the bathroom and while I was waiting for her to return from Reading’s second poshest public conveniences I was dawdling round the menswear. Then, winking at me from a fetching looking gift box, I saw it; a crisp white shirt covered in pink flowers, the sort of pattern I associated with Paul Smith, with other people, and I fell in love. If this had been a film, you would have heard a choir of angelic voices as I clapped eyes on it, but since instead it was real life I had to fight the temptation to provide this backing myself. I think the ultra-keen Christmas shoppers, keen to get ahead of the curve and sort out all their immediate family before December had even begun, would have taken a dim view of that.

As we’ve already established, I was incapable of making an independent decision so taking it to the counter and buying it would have been unthinkable. Instead, I lingered staring at it, like a seedy old man outside the school gates, until Kelly came into view. She’ll probably say it’s rubbish. I thought to myself, She’ll say ‘that’s the sort of thing your brother would wear’ and that will be the end of that. I wasn’t sure whether I was reassured or saddened by that, which might have been the best way. If she did say that, it would be the kiss of death; my brother dresses, as he writes, like a man ten years older than him pretending to be a man ten years younger.

"What do you think of this?" I said, casually, as if it didn’t matter. As I said it, in the pause between question and reply, I realised that it did.

"I love it. But do you have the courage to wear it?"

Even as I walked home with it stashed in a carrier bag, I wasn’t sure that I did. I still wasn’t sure when I took it out and ironed it. It had an awful lot of flowers on it, far more than I remembered when I’d seen it in the shop. It was almost more arboretum than garment. And then I tried it on, and I thought that maybe I did have the guts after all. The following morning, though, in the cold light of day it seemed an altogether more flamboyant proposition. Suddenly, my much-vaunted and eventually abandoned plan to grow a Hitler moustache for November was looking uncontroversial by comparison. Still, I didn’t have any other shirts washed and ironed. It was time to bite the bullet, or rather put it on, and head for work.

The first indication came early when I took off my coat, took my seat and asked Phil on the other side of the partition how his evening had been.

"Not bad mate, not bad, how was your… whoa!"

That sentence definitely didn’t end with the question mark I was expecting. It wasn’t a good sign.

"Did you wear that to win a bet?"

Phil wasn’t the only person bemused by my new style direction. Gemma took great delight in stepping back from it, giving it a critical look I usually associate with Antiques Roadshow and pronouncing it "interesting", which was no less than I deserved since I do that almost every time she premieres a new outfit ("It’s an interesting take on the batwing top" and "You’re the best advert for catalogue shopping I’ve ever seen" are just two examples of the critiques she didn’t quite take the way that I expected).

"I’m sure I had curtains like that as a kid." said Posh James on one of our coffee breaks standing round the urn, adding insult to injury. I’m sure a couple of the Indian contractors were struggling to keep a straight face, which I found particularly hard to take as they were also sporting colossal handlebar moustaches and tank tops which seemed to be made out of cardboard.

"You think it takes the letter ‘r’ out of the word ‘shirt’, don’t you?" I said. James only smirked in response.

When I thought all the most wounding descriptions had already been used, Iain dusted off the word I had been dreading most of all, the B word. "You’re very brave, wearing that." he said. I think it might have been meant to be supportive, but it conjured up an image of the whole office clubbing together to send me, my floral shirt and a baseball cap to Disneyland. With one simple adjective, Iain had transformed it from prized possession to terrible affliction.

It wasn’t the end of the matter. Two of the women in the office, both in their forties, pronounced it an incredible success. The only problem was that in the process of doing so they described it as "trendy" and "funky" respectively - which is a great compliment, but only if you’re the same age yourself. I’ve said it before, but if you describe something as trendy you immediately prove three things; you’re not, it’s not, and you have no idea what the word even means. And was it my imagination, or were more people walking past my desk that morning? Why did they all seem to be slowing down and covering their mouths with their hands as they did?

The watershed that lifted my morning came as we approached lunchtime. I stopped by my colleague Simone’s desk to ask if he wanted to join us. He’s Italian, always immaculately turned out, and conservative to a tee. He always wears crisp cotton shirts, is never seen without a tie (I wouldn’t put it past him to wear one to bed) and his idea of an adventurous pattern is chalk stripe. He looked up at me from an important spreadsheet with an expression I couldn’t place.

"What are you doing, my friend?"

"Oh, you mean the shirt. Don’t you like it?"

By this stage I’m not sure why I was still asking this question. I’ve never experienced anything where people were quite so willing to offer their completely unsolicited opinion. Really, it’s a wonder people hadn’t tried to stop me on my way to the bus stop that morning and tried to talk me out of it. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the security guard had tried to stage a sartorial intervention when I’d first entered the building.

"No, it is an abomination."

"Thanks. Thanks a lot."

"But I admire your bollocks for wearing it."

At lunch, the incessant teasing continued. "I bet you’re loving this, I think you just wore it to get all this attention." said Gemma, and I couldn’t completely rule out the possibility that this was indeed true. But I’m not sure I was listening by then, because I’d realised that Simone had a point. In fact, I reckoned he had hit on the crux of the whole thing, albeit by accident, because his words jogged my memory about why I’d fallen in love with that shirt in the first place. Maybe it was funky, trendy, interesting or unsuitable for work. But Iain was right on the money when he said it was brave, and that’s the thing I liked most of all. Whatever it looked like, I loved what it said about me. Maybe the sort of people who wear a floral shirt to work aren’t defined by being flamboyant, or stylish, or creative or successful. Maybe they’re not defined by any more than the fact that they’re prepared to man up and wear the thing in the first place. And maybe I had more in common with them than I thought.

The icing on the cake came that afternoon when my screen pinged with an instant message from Mikey, the only person who hadn’t weighed in yet with his two pence.

"Shirt troubles, yeh?"

“I’m afraid so.”

I had learned better by this stage than to ask him what he thought of it, but it didn't seem to make any difference: 'Mikey is typing a message' said the blue writing at the top of the window, for what seemed like an eternity. Go on, I thought, do your worst. There are no insults left, there is nothing more you can say. Let’s see your best shot, your cruellest adjective, your most damaging comparison. I am ready. I’ve spent the whole day getting ready. Knock yourself out. And then I realised that the window was flashing while I’d spent all that time ranting to myself.

“I really like it.”