…to Christian O’Connell’s morning show on Virgin this week, you have a chance of winning five grand – yes, five thousand English pounds – in a competition to create a soundtrack for Slam. You just have to submit five songs that you think would be appropriate for the story. There are clues in the book, of course, and as I’m judging the competition, anyone who shows any evidence of having flicked through it in a bookshop will be ahead of the game. I will be announcing the result on air at 6.45 am on Friday. 6.45 am is a quarter to seven in the morning, in old money. The lengths I’ll go to, to promote my own work! I usually sound pretty good then, though. Ask any of my kids.
 

…to milk my connection with Nicholas Hoult, the star of ‘About A Boy’ and ‘Skins’, for all it is worth. Nicholas kindly agreed to read the audiobook for SLAM, and the teenage girls in the audience for my reading at Lyme Regis told me that he was “hot”.

He would probably be the first to admit that he didn’t look hot in ‘About A Boy’. He was pretty odd-looking, which made him perfect for the role of Marcus. In Lyme, we watched a clip of About A Boy before the reading, and I sat there wondering if it was hard to have one’s geeky, gawky pre-adolescence preserved in celluloid like that. Did it put girls off? The answer, clearly, is a resounding ‘No’. But of course what happened to Nicholas Hoult is only a more public version of what happens to all adolescent boys and girls: we watch each other become suddenly more beautiful, and we forgive past misfortune very quickly. There’s something rather heartening about that.

…I had a book out, I appeared on stage with Francis Spufford, Blake Morrison and Andrew O’Hagen, debating the value of literature. For the publication of SLAM, I have shared a stage with Darren the rapper, various DJs, and half-a-dozen fifteen-year-old girls wearing hotpants. I have signed several skateboards, two cheeks (the facial variety, I hasten to add), and two pairs of trainers, one pair of which was, frankly, malodorous in the extreme. I have even signed some books. I am a great admirer of Morrison, Spufford and O’Hagen, and I’m sure they will understand when I say that it will be difficult to return to those discussions.