Tony Parsons

The earthquake wakes me up. One moment I am sleeping and the next it feels as though I am on a waterbed with Hugh Hefner and four Playboy Bunnies. All I can do is hold on. There is an earthquake every day in Japan and most of them feel like mild indigestion. But then you get this kind, the scary kind, and you immediately wonder — is this the big one? When it is happening, you just don’t know. All you can do is go to the window and see if buildings are collapsing, roads buckling and the earth opening up. This isn’t the big one. On the Richter scale, it is only four Playboy Bunnies. But somewhere out there, people are dying. There is a bar in Tokyo for you. A mad, perfect bar with perhaps four seats in it. The bar of your dreams.

As publication of my new novel, My Favourite Wife, draws closer, Fred Kindall steps up the training. You need to be a fit man to publish a novel these days. ‘It’s good to be alive,’ Fred exults, as I lie on the floor of his gym and he bounces a black medicine ball on my abdominal muscles. ‘You’re so lucky to be training,’ he screams, his favourite catchphrase. Fred is a boxer and so going to the gym no longer means sitting around watching Pimp My Ride on MTV. A boxer doesn’t exercise. He trains. The excess weight produced by your soft, affluent life just melts away in the presence of Fred. Every time he bawls in my face about how lucky I am to be training, I feel another couple of pounds drop away.

When Ernest Hemingway met Harold Robbins, the grand old man of American literature asked the alpha male of the bestseller list why he wrote. ‘Wealth,’ said Harold Robbins. ‘And I got it.’ Of all the lies that Harold Robbins told in his life — the fantasy most often repeated as fact is that his first wife was a Chinese dancer who died of a parrot bite — this was the most outrageous. Harold Robbins — who liked to boast that he was the only author ‘with his own goddamn yacht’ — did not write for money. Nobody on the bestseller list writes for money. The people who write for money never make it to the bestseller list.

Hong Kong They have moved the Star Ferry. How could they move the Star Ferry? The view of the harbour from my room at the Ritz-Carlton should be one of the great sights of Asia. But it is a building site of land being messily reclaimed and another corner of the ‘perfumed’ harbour getting paved over. I was here only six months ago but now Queen’s Pier has gone, the Star Ferry Pier has gone and those iconic green-and-white ferries have been shunted out to where you catch the boats to the outlying islands. Visitors to Hong Kong will never again ride the Star Ferry looking for the ghosts of William Holden and his Suzie Wong. But how can you complain about change in Hong Kong? It is like whining that the Arctic is a bit parky.

Vilnius Sex clubs are a bit different in Lithuania. You don’t walk down some dark alley, knock three times and ask for Lulu. Here they come and get you. I dump my suitcase, crack open the mini-bar and pick up the usual hotel spam about pay-per-view and fine dining. And out fall all these glossy leaflets featuring high-class escorts crawling on all fours. Call to our club for free taxi!! they urge. Outside my hotel window, I see the narrow streets of Vilnius Old Town are deserted apart from cruising stretch limos, awaiting the call from lonely foreign businessmen. And I wonder — do they also bring you back? Or do you have to get a Lithuanian minicab? I’ve got those lonesome book-tour blues, and I wouldn’t mind a quiet beer.

Heathrow. Crawling back into the country like a whipped cur after another disastrous American book tour. Difficult to pick the most abject humiliation. Dallas, where just one person showed up for the event? Boston, where it was twice that number, but one of them was a homeless bum taking advantage of all the empty seats? Never again. I give up on America. I am tired of book events in Midwestern hell-holes that resemble the Mary Celeste. I am tired of flying everywhere by ‘coach’. I am tired of fat rednecks telling me to take my shoes off at the airport. America — I quit. Hampstead. The unpacking is almost done. After ten years in Holloway, just being here lifts the spirits. This is the best place in London for children and dogs.