I’m listening to music and sometimes, to refresh my memory, I’m listening to Nick Hornby and me having a chat. I’m writing for an hour, I’m packing for an hour. I’ve underlined the following: “At the beginning of my writing career I reviewed a lot of fiction, but I had to pretend, as reviewers do, that I had read the books outside of space, time and self-in other words, I had to pretend that I hadn’t read them when I was tired and grumpy, or drunk, that I wasn’t envious of the author, that I had no agenda, no personal aesthetic or personal taste or personal problems.” I have no inclination to break the boundaries of space, time and self, so let me explain that, tired, grumpy and a shade hung over, I’m cobbling this together in the process of dismantling my study, book by book, file by file, paper by yellowing paper. I mention this because in front of me, open at page two, is Hornby’s book, The Complete Polysyllabic Spree (2006), a collection of columns he wrote for the Believer, the US literary magazine. The day after tomorrow I’ll be moving to a house I hadn’t even set eyes on when I went up to London last month to meet Nick Hornby. It’s 6am and I’m surrounded by cardboard boxes.
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