Sebastian Faulks

It’s that time of year when the local librairie-papeterie in your French holiday village is full of signs for la rentrée and English newspapers carry ads for gel pens and shoes with Velcro fastenings. I used to love this season as a schoolboy – discovering if I’d made the under-13 football training squad. For the past 40 years, though, September has been for me a different season: the time of the publishers’ launch party. These used to be lavish affairs, held in a hotel or gallery with themed drinks and food, the whole thing fizzing with romantic possibilities. In 2001 we had a memorable do for my American novel On Green Dolphin Street with a jazz quartet, cheeseburgers and bottomless dry Martinis. (What happened afterwards in Vauxhall Bridge Road has stayed in VBR.

In this summer of sporting dramas, every patriotic sports fan likes to think he’s done his bit to help. I went up to Manchester with my brother last Thursday and in the evening we found ourselves in an Indian restaurant with the England wicket-keeper Jonny Bairstow at the next table. I feel sure it was Edward’s and my manly cries of ‘Good luck, Jonny’ as he left that helped him bat so brilliantly for his 99 not out. Though I suppose it could have been the vindaloo that fired him up. My major influence on the Ashes series came a few days earlier, when I bumped into the Australian all-time-great batsman and scourge of England, Steve Smith. This was on the balcony of the All England Club at Wimbledon, where he was having a quiet chat with some friends.

When the much-admired (and very tall) literary agent Gillon Aitken died in October 2016, he left most of his estate in a charitable trust to be named after his daughter Charlotte, who had, very sadly, predeceased him. Quite soon, the trust will start its work, which is to ‘educate the public in the appreciation of literature’, including poetry and drama, by whatever means seem appropriate — to include prizes, grants, scholarships, the funding of retreats, courses and so on. As one of the trustees, my job is to find the best ways to fulfil Gillon’s wishes. The slate is blank.

I never expected to visit Iceland, let alone play cricket there. But the Iceland national team was off to play in the Pepsi Cup in Prague last week, against Hungary and Poland among others, and needed some easy meat to practise on. So the Authors XI found themselves in a vast indoor stadium in Reykjavik with artificial grass and a yellow ball, playing three 20-over games. The floodlights were dim and the ball swung prodigiously. When it bounced, it either stood up, stopped or hurried through low. The best word to describe batting conditions would be ‘difficult’. Our opening bowler, the novelist Nicholas Hogg, took four for seven in four overs. The Iceland team had one native Icelander and one Brit; the rest were from Sri Lanka or Pakistan.

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’.

Just back from Sri Lanka, a place I first went to in 1981. It was then a dreamy island. I remember giving the room boy who had brought my case to the bandicoot-infested bedroom in Colombo a few rupees, but he wasn’t interested. He just wanted to sit on the bed and talk — about London, England, cricket, life. Three decades and a civil war later, people are aware of money, there is bottled water, and a pot of tea doesn’t take half an hour to arrive. One thing that seems unchanged is the optimism of the people. The new president, Mr Sirisena, has promised an end to the corruption of the Rajapaksa regime.

A year or so ago I was asked to sit on a committee that advises the government on how to commemorate the first world war. It consists of about 30 dauntingly well-qualified people (former heads of the army and of Nato, historians, ex-defence secretaries), so there seems little for me to contribute at meetings. But it is interesting to be on the government side of something and see how it deals with public expectation and the press. In the summer there was a report in a British paper that the Germans had sent over their commemoration team and asked if, instead of dwelling on the conflict, the British could make 2014-18 a chance to talk up the European Union. I emailed the Department of Culture to ask if this could be right.