'Arf a sixpence

From Chicago I flew to New Jersey where there was just one school visit scheduled in the intriguingly named town of Ho Ho Kus. 'Who can tell me,' I asked, 'where the name Ho Ho Kus comes from?' A few hands were raised. 'It's Native American,' said one boy. 'Okay,' I said, 'but what does it mean?' Another kid shot his hand in the air. I could see he was desperate to say something. Anything. 'Er...happy?' he said. I never found out the real answer, but that one was good enough for me.

I had lunch with Bob and Mary Bookseller, who had organised the school visit, and discussed the cover of the second book over a beer with Katherine Editor. Around 9.30pm I boarded a half-empty flight for London. The sensible hemisphere of my brain said: 'free seat beside you. You've been up since 4am. Get some sleep.' The stupid hemisphere said 'Look! individual screens with twenty channels. Watch a movie! You could even watch two at once.' The stupid half won. I watched two thirds of a movie, then fell asleep just as it was getting to the good bit. I didn't sleep for long. There was a metal box where my feet wanted to be. I put up the armrest and curled up over two seats, a position in which I could achieve a kind of nadir for about four minutes out of every hour. I felt like a prawn with arthritis, and I wondered if the stupid hemisphere was really the smart one, and vice versa.

It took a few hours to adjust to London. It was at once familiar and strange. For a while I felt like a character in an American sitcom who spends a hilarious episode in a sort of giant cliché-ridden London. The girls from Simon and Schuster all seemed like quintessential British Birds. The girls in the hotel reception didn't, because they were all Polish. By evening things had reverted to normal, and I almost felt like I had never left. I lived here in the early eighties, when the Wicked Witch of Grantham was still manfully scrubbing the stain of humanity out of the fabric of politics, but London has too great a mass to change its character in a mere decade or two.

The sensible hemisphere woke up and told me to grab a couple of hours sleep between the afternoon's book signing at Waterstones and the Publisher's dinner in the evening, but I wasn't going to be fooled again. There was shopping to be done.

The dinner was a medium-sized schmoozefest in a nice hotel. By this time I was so cross-eyed with tiredness that I could look at two people at once and follow neither of their conversations. Among the other guests were Mark Robson, a previously self-published author who could sell sand to the Arabs, and Matt and Dave, co-authors of a slim volume named Yuck's Fart Club. Apparently they had discovered a shared interest in flatulence while rooming together in college, and after some years this blossomed into a book. Where there's gas there's brass, and I have two small boys at home who will undoubtedly be interested in what Matt and Dave have to say on the topic.