Psycho Commissioning Editor

I guess it might have been time for a retrospective. Hardly holed up in a lavish hotel room, experiencing reflective bliss in the sunlight after the rain.  I’m in a blissed-out and freshly rain-laundered Senate Square in Helsinki, my phone buzzing in my pocket and I take it out and read what’s there ‘for all the right reasons/ for all the right reasons’.

I was sent away yet again for business, ostensibly to sell books and to shift merchandise, to make connections and show face, my British pounds crumbling in the face of the strong Euro and the crippling taxes of Scandinavia. I left behind a headache-strewn New York and headed back to London with some relief – I can’t even place in my head what I feel here. Sometimes there’s a time for feeling and sometimes there’s a time for not knowing what you feel. 

Wandering listless through streets that add up to some kind of insidious argument, I’m paraphrasing an education through an overused racist poet and breaking bread alone in restaurants with enough food on my plate for three. Stacked-up cocktails and beers and the darkness won’t fall; I just see the kids empty out of the Finnkino from Molly Malone’s Irish Bar, a Guinness warming up in my hands and people crowded round. I can’t believe I’m starting to warm to the jobbing covers band that is making my evening brighter but yes, I am.   It won’t get dark. The sun just won’t set until I’m too tired to keep my eyes open. I think of Al Pacino in that film and maybe the guilt was his drug. You load yourself up with it because you can’t break free of the chains.

If it’s impressionistic, it’s because I’ve lost my way. I’m tired and scared of the future. E-books and Kindles and Jeff Bezos populate my nightmares together with spiders named after my authors. Jay-Z passes through with a guitar slung over his shoulder, handing out Rocawear jackets.  On the website it’s made clear he wants me to ‘customize my look’. I sit here sifting through some photos with a cigarette burning down in a small shot glass. I’m passing on the bong, passing it over to the left hand side – to an empty plinth in a tiny flat in North-West London surrounded by council tax bills and proof copies of books that I used to love when they were a glint in my eye. I don’t love them anymore.

The office calls and someone asks me when I’m coming back in but I hang up after uttering a word I can’t even remember. I look at my diary and it’s time to hit the road again.