…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.

God, Please Let Me Go Back – Josh Rouse
To The Dogs or Whoever – Josh Ritter
Girls In Their Summer Clothes – Bruce Springsteen
Monkey Man – Toots and the Maytals
Aftermarket Blues – Adam and Dave’s Bloodline
Chelsea Rodgers – Prince
It’s Only Money, Tyrone – Marah
Mansion On The Hill – The National
Versatile Heart – Linda Thompson
Slippin’ Around – Detroit Cobras
Melting Pot – The Roots

…I met a tiny fifteen-year-old girl who showed me her self-harming scars. She just wanted to die, she said, which is why she was thinking of having a baby. I asked her whether she ever talked to anyone at school about her problems, but it turned out that she didn’t attend school – she’d recently moved into the area, and she had failed to find a place anywhere.

It goes without saying that I could think of absolutely nothing of any value to say to her. I think a lot of writers would like to think that they can somehow connect with kids like that, and I did, sort of. She came to the reading, and she wanted to talk afterwards. But then what? All I can say for sure is that she didn’t try to hurt herself during our conversation. That’s about all the good I was able to do.

…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.
 

… in Norwich Millennium Library ended, as, presumably, East Anglian literary events usually do, with a group of lads slam-dancing on the library floor. It was a great evening, for me anyway: a good venue, a large and lively all-age crowd.

At the back of the Millennium Library is the 2nd Air Division Memorial Library, which commemorates the nearly seven thousand young US servicemen, all members of the division and based in Norfolk and Suffolk, who lost their lives during the Second World War. The librarian told me that the most frequent visitors to the Memorial Library are curious family members who wish to look at the archives, scrapbooks and the shrine kept there; but more recently, she said, she has been dealing with the enquiries of an increasing number of local men and women in their early-to-mid sixties. These people have just learned, quite often from a dying mother, that their fathers were US servicemen stationed in the area.

Apart from all the artifacts, the Memorial library holds a pretty decent collection of recent American non-fiction, the sort of stuff that’s been reviewed in the New Yorker in the last few weeks; I ran around writing down the names of books I wanted to read. The new biography of Dr Dre that was on display doesn’t seem to have been checked out yet.