The cult of cleverness
Whenever I’m at a dinner party with very clever people, I always feel like I’m the dumbest person in the…
Can this dating gimmick help me find love?
Could a new gimmick help me find love?
I can’t make up my mind about microdosing
I know that microdosing — the practice of taking a very small amount of a mood enhancing drug — has…
Why I won’t grow up
Recently, a famous American novelist came to stay at my place in London. In her later Substack post she described…
Literary festivals are no fun
This is the season when literary festivals start to happen all over the UK. From the highlands of Scotland to…
Can I be a woman?
How I tried — and failed — to become a woman
The joy of missing out
As I write this the coronation of King Charles hasn’t happened yet, but I’m having great fun watching the procession…
The sex lives of writers
A fellow writer recently asked me if I would prefer to be famous as a great writer or famous as…
Confessions of a class tourist
Why I used to pretend to be working class
The day I sold my destroyed piano to the Tate
One day in October 1966 I came home from school and found a large man stripped to the waist, attacking…
Why your more successful friends will drop you
How success kills friendships
In defence of staring
The criminalisation of people-watching
Why men of a certain age love to get naked
Why men of a certain age love to get naked
It’s no longer just clean eaters who are the health bores
It’s no longer just clean eaters who are the health bores
Would you go to a naked dining club?
My evening at a naked dining club
Help! I don’t know what a cervix is
With all this talk of private parts, the political has now gotten very personal. Recently, I was having an argument…
My failed attempts to be a good Samaritan
Being a good Samaritan is harder than it seems
We’ve become a nation of armchair psychiatrists
Let’s leave mental health diagnoses to the professionals
The agony of watching friends succeed
The agony of literary envy
The joy of drinking alone
Thanks to a combination of night-time curfews, social-distancing rules, pubs closing, restaurants failing, the ‘rule of six’ and compulsory mask-wearing,…
I spent Christmas Day helping the homeless – and I was bored out of my mind
When I told friends that I would be spending Christmas Day helping the homeless at a Crisis at Christmas centre…
OK zoomer, is that really the best you’ve got?
Every generation and teen subculture likes to put the boot into baby boomers like me. I’ve been physically attacked by…
In praise of cultural elitism
At present we have a series of ‘culture wars’ over a wide range of issues — race, gender, sexuality, power…
