Diary

When Trevor Phillips stood down as chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, he had served nine years. His period remains the longest of any UK equality commissioner. So when the confected outrage started over my Sun column about Everton footballer Ross Barkley I was not surprised to see a text pop up from Mr Phillips. I feared he would join the Liverpool bandwagon claiming I was a racist because I had compared the look in the eyes of Barkley with a gorilla. Actually I and every football fan I had ever met believed Barkley to be white. Unluckily for me, but luckily for my enemies in the north-west, that was not entirely true. It emerged that although Barkley looked white, his grandfather was half-Nigerian.

Don’t get old! Everything takes so long – it’s an hour to get down to breakfast. And I’m not only slow, but confused as well. Sometimes I can’t find a garment I took off the night before, or can locate only one sock (I usually have two). I’ve always been a bare-feet-and-sandals man; I have on my wall a quote by Einstein, ‘I never wear socks, they are useless garments.’ I do so agree with him, but Old Age strikes again. I now have to wear a toe spacer and this falls out if I have no socks on, so I’m locked into a cycle of sock dependency. There’s a great fashion for ‘de-cluttering’ these days, but what exactly is clutter? Stuff left lying about when it should be in the bin? I’m not guilty of that.

In the NHS clinic where I work, adults who suspect they may have Asperger syndrome wait almost a year for a diagnosis. The clinic takes referrals from all over Cambridgeshire and Peterborough (a population of 860,000), but we have to see all of them in the hours of a single full-time doctor. And the clinic is not given funds to run a follow-up support service once someone has been diagnosed. These individuals struggle to socialise, are neurologically different, and are overlooked because their disability is invisible. Many have experienced bullying in childhood, underemployment in adulthood and exploitation because of their social naivety. Many are made to feel inferior despite their often considerable talents. No surprise that many develop depression.

Oh dear. Usually writers who contribute to these diaries start with something like, ‘To Paris. To launch my novel at Shakespeare and Company.’ Well, I went instead to Penarth, which is a charming seaside suburb of Cardiff, and got a right royal welcome. I told the customers of Griffin Books (and Book-ish in Crickhowell and Cover to Cover in Mumbles) that I forbade them to buy books from Amazon. If they didn’t support their independent bookshops, they would lose them. And bookshops are vital for community health. Think what Daunt’s did for Marylebone High Street; started its transformation from a non-street to a destination street, no less. Speaking of Daunt’s, do you realise that their business rates are about to double?

A fortnight ago I got a taste of what being far too famous might feel like. A leak that I’m a contender for the Mary Berry slot on The Great British Bake Off morphed into the fake news that I’d got the job. For 24 hours it was a lead story — then it was yesterday’s non-news. My daughter, Li-Da Kruger, has made me her plus-one on the maiden voyage of Viking Sky, the swankiest cruise ship imaginable, all spacious showers, leather handrails and the surreal experience of sitting in the hairdresser’s with a roiling sea of black water and white-topped waves rushing past. Li-Da was booked to show her documentary Belonging to the passengers as part of the cruise’s ‘enrichment programme’.

More than 20 years ago, I left my fast life in London for a rather more relaxed one in Brighton and Hove. I never dreamt I could enjoy it more till all the business with the trains started up a few years back. The chaos at Southern Railway — which has seen commuters lose their livelihoods and property prices all along the London–Brighton line plunge, and culminated last summer in the resignation of the rail minister Claire Perry — has effectively put an end to the one thing I disliked about my seaside city. Namely, that it’s too close to That London. I never minded mates coming down to visit — all the better for showing off my beloved playground. The trouble came when they expected one to reciprocate.

February Fill-Dyke. But north Norfolk is dry, at least in terms of rain. Instead we have coastal flooding. Three years ago, a tidal surge caused major damage and destruction to sea defences, wildlife habitats, paths and buildings. Another surge last month was less dramatic but still reached the gate of a friend’s house, set well back, behind marshes and road. It is terrifying to experience this unstoppable force and hear its mighty roar. Whole shingle banks were flicked aside. As a small child, I stood on the cliff top above raging seas in Scarborough, and the storm seemed biblical. You never underestimate the force of nature, and possibly the wrath of God, once you have witnessed a tidal surge. Brexit has been as bad as any surge in washing away hitherto strong foundations.

Did you know that if you use the f-word while talking to a BT representative, they hang up on you? Here’s how our conversation went when I finally got through after several abortive attempts and ‘holding’ for at least 15 minutes. Me: ‘I’m ringing because the engineer who was supposed to come between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. has not turned up. I’ve been waiting for over five hours. My name is xxx, my reference number is xxx.’ BT man: ‘Could you give me your date of birth and the first line of your address?’ Me: ‘My date of birth is xxx, my address is xxx. This is the third time I’ve been asked.

In December I was in a group of writers on a British Council visit to Moscow, where the UK was the guest nation at the Moscow Book Fair. This entailed going to art galleries, restaurants and to the Bolshoi as well as giving various talks. The hunger for books at the fair itself was extraordinary. Young people queued with armfuls of the latest Jim Crace, Jonathan Coe, Julian Barnes or Marina Warner in the hope of a signature. Used as we are to the apologetic €1,000 advance and talk of young people not reading any more, this was heady stuff. One night my Russian publisher, Alexander Andryuschenko, took me and my son William, who was passing through, to dinner at the Pushkin restaurant because he says it is the only place you can get ‘real Russian food’.

On New Year’s Day I went for a swim off Broad Haven beach in Pembrokeshire. The water was 10.3ºC: pretty good agony, but not as bad as the cold on the soles of my feet as I changed on the icy sand. Cold-water swimming is on the up — 700 people took part in the Boxing Day swim in nearby Tenby, the most in its 46-year history. I can see the attraction. A freezing sea is a tremendous hangover cure. Once back indoors you glow as the blood, which rushes to the core of your body to prevent heat loss underwater, races back to your skin. A cold swim is like a hair shirt. After the indulgence of Christmas and New Year’s Eve, self-inflicted pain is a fine mental corrective.

Every year, from mid-November to mid-January, dozens of DVDs drop through my letterbox. These are most of the movie releases of the past year. It is with great anticipation that I tear open the yellow padded envelopes from Sony or Disney or The Weinstein Company, and even from companies I’ve never heard of; but invariably it’s with disappointment that I scan the hundreds of titles unknown to me, and I do read Screen Daily and the Hollywood Reporter. I’m amazed that the production companies manage to finance some of these films. I know from whence I speak. However, snuggled up on the sofa in the days before Christmas I dutifully watch all the films in preparation to vote in the Bafta and Academy Awards. It’s like training for a marathon.

Novelists can’t merely tell cracking tales. We’re supposed to save the world. At the University of Kent, a student implored me to inscribe The Mandibles with instructions for ‘how to keep this from happening’ — for the feverish young man now vowed to devote his life to preventing my new novel’s debt-fuelled near-future financial collapse. And I thought I was just doing a book signing. I wrote, ‘To keep this from happening, pay your bills. To cash in on this happening, get as deeply into debt as possible.’ The next student proffered a tiny spiral notebook, in which I was to jot ‘three things that are really important’.

It is odd when someone you know becomes a world-famous Nazi. You may not recognise the name Richard Spencer, but my bet is you soon will. He’s an American white-power activist who is often billed as the inventor of the ‘alt-right’. In the age of Trump, when everyone is panicking about the rise of extremism and the end of liberal democracy, he commands a lot of attention. Spencer has emerged as a media anti-darling — a hardcore version of the gay British controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos, whom I also know a little. (Hark at my social life.) Milo does the camp feminist-and-Islam-baiting thing; Richard is a full-on white supremacist. They both exploit the growing market for troublesome right-wing bogeymen.