History repeating itself

It sounds like the Napoleonic wars are going on outside. I'm sitting in my 2nd floor studio in the town, where I usually go to get a bit of work done, but today is the final day of Fiesta Mayor, which means firecrackers and marching drums and the eerie sight of the town's 'giants' passing by the window - papier mache heads the size of space hoppers with a fixed stare that would make you take stock of your life.

The smell of gunpowder fills the air, and if a cannonball were to fly in and demolish my drawing desk I can't say it would seem that surprising. At least I'd have an excuse to take the rest of the day off.

A line of dead highwaymen

The driver who picked me up from Seattle Tacoma airport lost no time in telling me of his Irish roots. His grandfather allegedly came from a long line of highwaymen, most of whom had been shot for robbery. I didn't think it would be polite to point out that his errant forefathers would have been far more likely to be hanged or transported, even if there was a grain of truth in the story, but it was obvious that truth was not the objective. I did ask him if he always told people who were trapped in the back of his car that all his ancestors were robbers. "I never thought of it that way," he chuckled.

He then proceeded to tell me that the country was going to hell in a handcart due to the efforts of the gun control lobby. "There were two cities in the US," he told me with an air of authority. "In one they banned private gun ownership, and in the other they made it mandatory for every household to own a gun. And you know what?" I could not imagine what was coming. "In the first city the crime rate soared, and in the second it dropped almost to nothing."

"Is that so?" I asked. "Which city was it that made handguns mandatory?"

"Well, I may have exaggerated a little," he muttered. "They made it much easier to get handguns, maybe. I think it was in Georgia," For all I know he might be right, but this account did not smack any more of scientific rigour than his story of an unbroken line of dead highwaymen.

I considered strolling out to get a feel for Seattle at night, but once I had tested the hotel bed for comfort I was unable to get off it again, and I was looking at another early start in the morning. I ordered the usual three-breakfasts-in-one for the crack of dawn (The knack of leaving out items from a breakfast order would not appear in my skill set, if I had a CV), and collapsed into coma.

A frozen coffee

I was picked up at an ugly hour of the morning for the ninety minute drive to Irvine, south of LA. The day's events were organised by a charming and energetic greek-american lady named Alex from Whale of a Tale bookshop. We dropped into the coffee shop next door to grab a shot of caffeine to go, and I ordered at random from their menu of fancy coffees. What I got was a sort of coffee milkshake that was largely solid, and possessed the strange property of melting from the bottom up. This meant that the cup had to be tipped right up to catch a trickle of cold coffee from under the ice-floe, and righted again before said ice-floe could suddenly detach itself from the cup walls and deal my face a cold slap. There's probably an art to it, but it didn't come with instructions. Or a straw.

There's a game I play with the kids at the school presentations, when time permits. It involves me drawing The Null with markers on a flipchart pad, guided by suggestions from the students. The Null is a monster of unknown provenance who appears early in the first book and who I described as sketchily as possible to allow the reader's imagination to fill in the gory details. Their suggestions usually start with the obvious - one kid will say big red eyes, another will suggest fangs, but once the basics are taken care of the details swiftly veer into left field, and I'm always amazed how completely different are the creatures spawned by the collective imagination of each group.

On this occasion the morning session threw up a creature with bloody fangs, a pig's tail, and a snotty nose, the girls generally outdoing the boys in providing the more repulsive details. By this time my coffee had melted to room temperature, which made it about as warm as any coffee I've been served so far on this side of the Atlantic. The afternoon's monster had a shark's fin and a single foot with a spring underneath, so that it could pogo after its victims. I wish I'd thought of that one myself.

I give out prizes for the best suggestions, and my criterion is normally to reward the most way-out proposals, like foot-springs and 'I love Mom' tattoos. This time I made an exception for a girl who suggested 'sad eyes' for the monster. It was the first time I've ever had that one thrown at me, and it struck me as an unusually sympathetic notion.

After the second school visit there was just time to sign the stock at Whale of a Tale before heading to John Wayne airport for a flight to Seattle. On the way to the airport I asked the driver to stop by an Apple store so I could take advantage of the feeble dollar and pick up some goodies for my kids. The mall where we stopped was awash with money. Some of the men were more orange-tanned and coiffured than their partners, and they strolled around the Apple shop collecting a couple of laptops here and a handful of iPods there, the way you might pick up some veg and a packet of bog rolls at the local Spar.

On the plane I sat next to two Chinese American girls of about nineteen. Each was describing her hairdo and her purchases in great detail on her mobile. When the time came to turn off the phones they continued the conversation with each other, and by the end of the flight they had been talking about shopping for two solid hours without pausing for breath. You have to admire that kind of stamina.

Flip-flops. Extras. Exploding luggage

I flew into Los Angeles and was taken to the Mondrian hotel on Sunset Boulevard. The lobby was undergoing refurbishment, so I was ushered through an underground entrance by a brick-shithouse security guard with a curly cable plugged into his ear. It was a Bobby Kennedy moment, and at first I was too busy looking out for armed and disaffected kitchen workers to notice what a strange planet I had arrived on.

This was the second of only two visits I've made to LA, and brief ones at that, but I get an overwhelming feeling that the entire city and its population are the creation of the cartoonist Daniel Clowes. There's a bizarre plastic energy in the place that's every bit as strong as the crackle of Manhattan, but entirely different in character. When in New York I still get a huge kick out of standing in the middle of Times Square (along with all the other gawpers) and just drinking in that buzz that comes from eight million lives lived at full tilt. In LA it's like the switch has been thrown the other way. Everyone you see is on the verge of their big break, perched on the edge of hotel sofas with bush-baby stares, trying to suck fame towards them and fearful of missing that blink-of-an-eye moment when their One Chance might slouch by in designer flip-flops and disappear into the glare.

I had a meeting with two people from the Gotham group, a talent agency that has brokered some high-profile movie deals for Harper Collins. I was half expecting Batman and Robin, and I wasn't sure what the appropriate dress might be for such an encounter. In any case my flight had touched down late, which barely left me time to apply a clean shirt and a squirt of mouthwash before I received a call from the front desk to say that my guests had arrived. Was I coming down, the receptionist asked, or should she send them up to my room?

Her question took me by surprise. Clearly there's a different way of doing business in LA, and I wondered if this meant my guests would be expecting a couple of lines of hospitality powder rather than a demonstration of my Fabulous Exploding Luggage trick, which was all they would get. I decided to play it safe and come down to the lobby instead.

Instead of Batman and Robin I met Julie and Tim, who were reassuringly down to earth and did not wear capes. They had a plumbless enthusiam for the entertainment business and some fascinating insights into the workings of Hollywood, not to mention the goings on in the hotel itself, which it turns out is one of the premier night spots for the glitterati. The after-hours parties around the pool deck, they assured me, would make a tabloid journalist choke on his daquiri. As it happens I had a dinner date with some friends who live in LA, which saved me from the temptation to have myself turned away from the night's shenanigans by mister brick shithouse, or worse still, let in as a hotel guest to wander around like Ricky Gervais on Extras. Somebody up there likes me.

Group Whoops

I turned on the early morning news and was met by the familiar sight of OJ Simpson in a prison jumpsuit. It seemed he and some buddies had held up a dealer in OJ memorabilia and tried to repatriate his stuff. The haul included the suit OJ had worn at his original trial. I tried to imagine the line of questioning he would face.

Prosecutor: What were you doing with that baseball bat, mister Simpson?
OJ: If I was OJ Simpson...

I did two presentations at a school in Darien, Illinois, and afterwards was treated to a relaxed lunch in the school library with a group of 'best readers.' The kids were lively and full of imagination, and I was politely and comprehensively interrogated until it was time to leave.

Later that evening I was scheduled to sign books at Anderson's bookstore. The crowd was once again intimate in size, but what it lacked in numbers it more than made up for in enthusiasm. One woman had driven two hours to hear me read, and left with a shopping bag full of signed books for her book club.

Back at the hotel there were two events in full swing; a sales conference and a revivalist meeting. I sat in the restaurant for an hour or so, listening to declamations and group whoops from the conference room next door as I tackled another mountain of food, but for the life of me I couldn't tell which meeting they were coming from.

Very Important Ladies

My first engagement that didn't involve biscuits was at Books of Wonder on W 18th St. It was a joint signing with Melissa Marr, author of a teen-fantasy-fairy-romance entitled Wicked Lovely. Melissa is a tattoo afficionado (though hers were all discreetly hidden) and irresistably attracted to all things Oirish. She rhapsodised about a recent visit to Ireland, where she stayed in a haunted castle whose proprietor was happy to indulge her with liberal doses of diddly-eye music and roguish tales. And why not, indeed.

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon in bookshop land. A few curious onlookers sidled by and one girl sat patiently with her father for a whole hour, so I read a chapter of the Tiger's Egg, and we signed piles of books while being entertained by the bookshop owner, Peter. There seemed to be few subjects with which he was unfamiliar, not least some lesser known (in the US at any rate) British TV series that were staples of my childhood and which he must have followed on some obscure channel. He apologised for the modest size of our fanbase, but in truth I doubt that anyone passing the shop had the faintest idea who the two famous authors inside were. And it was a quiet Sunday afternoon.

Monday morning's event was in Clinton, New Jersey. The school visit was arranged by an affable gent named Harvey, who had quit the rat-race to run a bookshop in a quiet town, and seemed to be doing a fine job of it. I was road-testing a short powerpoint presentation that would accompany my usual preamble on illustration and how it can lead to a downward spiral of involvement in childrens literature and culminate in a life of writing. It seemed to go down well.

Afterwards I was driven to Harper Collins offices to meet the charming Very Important Ladies of Children's publishing, and we sat around in a room far too comfortable to be called an office until it was time for my flight to Chicago. I attempted to have the term 'latte' explained to me, but the closest we could get was that it was a sort of stuffing in a coffee that made it taller. Somebody was dispatched to get me one. It was an excellent coffee, but I couldn't taste the tallness.

Flights from La Guardia were delayed, and my plane sat on the tarmac for a couple of hours while the captain counted down the number of aircraft queuing in front of us. By the time I arrived in my Chicago hotel it was late, and I was hungry. After the customary dive for the thermostat to defrost the room, I called room service and ordered Nachos with Everything. A plate the size of a dustbin lid arrived in due course, with a mountain of tortilla chips and chili piled on it. Unfortunately the human animal possesses no natural impulse to stop eating cheese nachos until his teeth hit the plate, and I think it was only jaw fatigue that saved my life. My ill-considered menu choice became apparent in the morning when I realised the degree of intestinal fortitude that would be required to stand up for two hours of presentations after feasting on Jalapenos in the early hours. Did I possess the Right Stuff, I wondered?

The Tiger's Egg tour: A deep-fried biscuit

I arrived in New York, the first stop in my second book tour, in a state of unpreparedness that was extreme even by my standards. I had managed to miss two earlier emails informing me that my flight had been brought forward by a day, which meant that all the things I had planned to do the day before I left had to be done in half the time, and in place of a night's sleep. I dropped my bags in my hotel room and asked the concierge for directions to a barber-shop. She didn't seem familiar with the term, and directed me to an establishment that she pointedly called a salon.

I thanked her and headed in the opposite direction. I don't possess enough hair to be saloned, and I was afraid I might look out of place without a poodle under my arm. I headed for Chinatown instead and found a hole-in-the-wall barbershop of the kind we used to frequent as children, where we would receive a quick and brutal short-back-and-sides surrounded by fake wood panelling and the sound of Val Doonican from a cheap transistor.

The barbershop was a mother and daughter outfit, and reassuringly dingy. "I cut good, don't I?" said Ma hairdresser, a couple of minutes into the job. I assured her that it was shaping up well, although basically a haircut for me involves making short hair a bit shorter. We were in the overlap between Chinatown and Little Italy, and outside the window the 80th annual San Gennaro festival was in full swing. A DJ was installed on the corner, playing wall-to-wall seventies music, some of which I hadn't heard in thirty years. "Hi, I'm Archie Bell and the Drells, and thizz a song called the Tighten-up..."

Ma hairdresser kept up a running commentary throughout, drawing my attention to the oustanding quality of her work, and when she had finished she engaged me in a brisk debate about the size of the tip I was offering. I lived in Hong Kong for two years and I'm used to the way Chinese do business. It's blunt, to the point, and I like it.

The streets of Little Italy were thronged with people, and decorated with red, white and green tinsel. The San Gennaro festival is largely about eating cheese steaks and Italian sausage and buying t-shirts featuring the words 'wiseguy', 'fuggedaboudit' and 'fuckin' in various combinations. I had just finished a coffee big enough to drown a goat in when I noticed that some of the stalls were advertising DEEP FRIED OREOS. I assumed at first that it was some obscure t-shirt slogan, but on closer inspection I discovered the stallholders were actually frying chocolate biscuits in thick batter, and doing it in broad daylight without fear of arrest. In my backpacking days I had followed a strict principle of eating local, which led to some daunting menu choices - Sea slugs and shredded jellyfish spring to mind - but the battered biscuit took...well...the biscuit. I steeled myself for the experience.

It was a hollow one, I'm here to tell you. The biscuit had softened to the same texture as the batter, so it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. I had taken two bites when my hand gave a unilateral caffeine-twitch and the offending article was flipped to the ground. It was trodden on by a six-foot-wide black guy in a pair of shorts so enormous that they reached his ankles, which made me wonder how I knew they were shorts. I'm still working that one out.

Circling. Cravats. Publicists.

The first stop of my last day was a bookshop in the top of Harrods. Harrods was a trip. In the four years I lived in London I had never set foot inside the door, and I had no idea it was so funky inside. At that time my monthly clothing budget was around four pounds, and I had usually gargled that before it could even snag me a pair of socks.

I had been directed to the childrens' book department, which is at the top of the 'Egyptian escalator.' I didn't know the ancient Egyptians had discovered the escalator, but I was soon put right. This one seemed to have been excavated from somewhere in Giza and reconstructed piece by piece in the heart of Knightsbridge. It carried me up four levels, surrounded by a wealth of brass ornament featuring snakes and the like, with a strangely prescient touch of art deco. Massive sandstone pillars were carved with Egyptian gods. There were several I recognised, but the only one I could name was Anubis, presumably in town to pick up a Chanel bag and a pair of slingbacks for Mrs. Anubis.

Penny Publicist awaited me in the book department. 'Thank goodness you look like your picture' she said as I came in, although there wasn't another soul in the department apart from the shop assistant, and she was a girl. Penny was charming, and after I signed a pile of books she waited patiently while I emptied the shop of its entire stock of Doctor Who books. For my kids, you understand. Doctor Who may have travelled from the dawn of humanity to its fiery end, but he has yet to arrive in Spain.

I found out that September is the touring season for authors. They were coming in the windows, and in almost every shop we visited there was an author leaving as we arrived, and another arriving as we left. At Waterstones in Picadilly they were circling in a holding pattern in the stairwell. I have no doubt that with a good rifle and a vantage point in the Charing Cross Road you could bag a dozen in the space of an hour.

The standard uniform, at least among the more mature authors, is a smart jacket or suit and a silk cravat. 'Maybe I should get myself an outfit like that', I speculated. 'You're fine as you are,' said Penny, with admirable professionalism. Publicists are trained not to laugh derisively at their clients, just as hairdressers are trained not to say 'Oh crap!' when they're working at the back of your head. It was a quiet day, involving stock signings in a series of shops, with no fanfare. As an unknown author I can blend with the other customers, who look at me slightly suspiciously while I deface piles of books in a corner. After a busy week in the US I was glad of the break. I was sure my face would fall off if I had to smile much more.

I stayed overnight with my brother, who lives conveniently near Gatwick, and took an early flight home in the morning. I had planned to stay another day, but our house in Spain was without water as it had all drained out of the pipes and flooded the basement. The power supply was reduced to one electric socket with extension leads snaking in all directions, and I was needed at the pumps. Where we live, most houses over a decade old seem to have been designed by clowns. Turning on the tap is liable to make the lights go out, and a ring on the doorbell might produce a jet of water from under the sink. It's easy to understand why most plumbers are electricians and vice versa, although their verdict is usually the same: 'Oooh, complicated. Very complicated. You'd have to find the problem first, then fix it.'

Fortunately we found a plumbtrician who instinctively grasped that that was why we had called him, and what's more he knew where to start. Much remains to be fixed, but we now have both power and water simultaneously, and since that returns me to a semblance of normality I will put this blog in the freezer until my next trip, which I'm told will be sometime in summer 07. You have been warned.

'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.

Hairy, scary and vivid

Queuing for the security check at Los Angeles airport I was behind a girl with a baby buggy and two huge bags. She looked about twenty. I offered to help her with her luggage, and we got into conversation. She had a little brother who was nine, and who reads incessantly. 'Like, he reads a book in three-four days,' she said. 'I keep telling him - why y'all reading all those books all the time? Get outside and do sumthin.' She had a silver stud in her tongue, and it clicked against her teeth. Her bag felt like it was full of lead. I didn't tell her what I was doing in the US, and she didn't ask.

There were no events scheduled for the weekend, so I had arranged to fly to San Francisco on the Saturday morning. Northern California is stiff with Berkeleys, and I spent the weekend with family before doing two school talks and a book signing on the Monday. The kids were so keen and interested it made me think there must be something to this writing game after all. I arranged with their teachers that they would all draw pictures of 'The Null' – a nightmare beast who appears in the early chapters of the book. I awarded prizes for the best drawings, but so hairy, scary and vivid were the entries that choosing a winner was almost impossible. Afterwards I caught a late flight from Oakland airport, touching down in Chicago Midway at 2am.

It was warmer than I expected outside, but in Chicago hotels they take their air conditioning seriously. The hotel corridors were supernaturally cold, and I half expected to see the spirits of the dead sliding hollow-eyed out of the stripy wallpaper. I headed for my room in the hope of a more hospitable climate, but when I opened the door it was like stepping into a meat-locker. I could see my own breath. I threw the air conditioning into reverse, and while I waited for the temperature to rise to life-sustaining levels I kept myself warm by tossing the excess pillows from the bed. Upmarket hotels take pride in the number of pillows they can arrange on one bed, but I only have one head, so most of them have to go. I sometimes wonder how many ducks go naked to provide just one hotel with surplus pillows, and I think of our usual family holidays, which generally involve the cunning art of trying to sneak a family of seven into a single hotel room half the size of this one. Here we'd have three pillows each. The Irish were kings of the world at room-stuffing, at least until we were overtaken by the Chinese. They stack up, I believe.

I've also discovered the secret of dining in silver-service restaurants without feeling intimidated. It's very simple: always eat the garnish. All of it, including the flower. It's the last thing they expect you to do, and it keeps them on the defensive. Leave the prawns instead. It's far from prawns we were raised.

Speaking of silver service, I was drawn into McDonalds at the departure gate in Chicago O'Hare by a mysterious force called breakfast pancakes with syrup. Hot pancakes are a triumph of American civilisation. They understand sugar lows. On the bin where I emptied my tray there was an ad: Cholesterol and Blood Sugar Screening, $45.

A fibreglass bandit

I flew into LA, and was driven along palm-lined boulevards to my hotel. Between the palm trees marched endless billboards which seemed to be part of some fierce ratings battle between rival TV medical dramas. Immaculate teams of white-coated hollywood personalities grinned from every poster. I wouldn't want any of them near me in an operating theatre. They looked like they would be too busy buffing their teeth in the mirror to notice that your liver had fallen out and was flopping about in a steel dish.

I met up with some friends who moved recently to LA, and we went to Sunset Boulevard to eat. After the restaurant we strolled along the boulevard looking for a bar. Most of the bars were themed, but whereas in other places the theming tends to be mainly internal, in LA they wear it on the outside. We sat outside a bar that was like a film set of a Waaald West Saloooon. Two fibreglass bar girls waved from a balcony in their flouncy dresses, and a fibreglass bandit burst out through the wall beside them on his fibreglass horse. The beer seemed real enough.

Back in my hotel room I could hear the rattle of helicopters outside the window. There were three of them holding a triangular formation above a tall building. Their noses were all facing into the centre and they looked far too close to each other for comfort. A fourth helicopter was flying in rapid circles around them, his own nose pointed towards the hovering group as he flew. This went on for some minutes, like a strange mating ritual. I suppose helicopters have to come from somewhere. Eventually the three female helicopters broke formation and flew off towards the hills, and the male helicopter headed in another direction to sulk.

There were three school visits the following day, where I faced the combined intelligence of hundreds of sharp-witted ten-year-olds with nothing for protection but a wireless microphone clipped to my ear. I found that turning my head at a certain angle produced feedback from the speakers. It occurred to me that if a rock-hard question came up I could just tilt my head and stun the questioner with a scream of feedback. By the time they recovered the question would be forgotten. It didn't come to that, which was probably a good thing.

Later I ate in a fancy creperie, attended by an extremely eager waitress. I've noticed with some American girls that the more polite and helpful they wish to appear, the higher their voices become, and this waitress swiftly reached a pitch where she could only have been heard by a dog. She must be saving for something important, I thought, so I tipped big.