Home

Have just picked up the copy of Visiting Mrs Nabokov I have on my desk after doing the Dabbler bit referred to below. In the intro, Martin Amis says: 'In 1980, I quit going to an office and became a full-time writer. The main characteristic of this way of life, it seemed to me, was that nothing ever happened to you'.

Perhaps that line jumped out because I've just finished a spell of going into an office. As I'm not Martin Amis, I expect I'll have to go back into one at some point, too, but maybe not for a while. I've worked in some good ones. The first was the Black Cat building at Mornington Crescent, where Kerrang! was sited on the ground floor round the third corner between Sounds and a woman's mag that I think I remember was called She. Then we went to the Daily Express building at Blackfriars, 'the 'grey lubyanka' of Private Eye fame where I once got the lift with Eve Pollard, Jean Rook and John Selwyn Gummer. We had a brief spell in John Street below an Arabic paper that had fearsome security before we moved to Carnaby Street. Later, long after I'd left Kerrang!, I worked in an office where The Office was filmed. The one I've just left was referred to, with chilling modernity, as 'a campus', even though it's not.

Somehow, I've been doing this since I left college [LCP - depressing, brutalist tower block at Elephant and Castle, from where the police station just up the road sometimes recruited us to make up the numbers in identity parades; fee - a can of flat beer...]. Although I've almost always gone to offices, many of the things I've written have necessitated getting out of them, too. Something nearly always happened while I did.

Now I'm at home, writing something that doesn't involve going out. Like Mart said, nothing has happened so far, but then I've only been here a day. We'll see.