On monkeys, magpies and sleeping in airports

I am sleeping in Bangkok Airport tonight. I love airports, full of greetings and goodbyes, essentially full of stories and human intrigue. Tomorrow morning I’ll board my flight back to beautiful, bursting, brilliant London. Only for two weeks when I’ll reacquaint myself with Hackney and the people whose faces I’ve missed and spend a lot of time at the Southbank revising up a storm. After that it’s off to Paris for six weeks working. I love Paris too, I’ve never been there in springtime and I am fantasising about all that beautiful light (and cake) (and vintage shopping) (and their excellent, excellent library).

After that? Who knows. 2013 is joyfully unstructured for me though I do have the Aye Write Festival, Firestation Bookswap and Polari in April, a month Supervising at Cambridge’s Pembroke College with the National Academy of writing in August, the launch of the French edition of Tony Hogan. I suspect this year has some more surprises ahead too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my transient, fly by the seat of my pants lifestyle which really, is just my pursuit of freedom to write. People have taken to asking me particular questions ‘don’t you get lonely?’ (yes, sometimes, doesn’t everyone) don’t you wish you had a home? (define home), aren’t you worried about leaving it too late to settle down? (would you ask a man in his early thirties that same question?) The truth is this: writing and living fully and decently are my absolute priorities for this year. If I have time to read and work and have small adventures each day then I think I will become a better writer, that it will make for better books in time to come.

I am a glutton for sights, smells, noises, new people and trying to understand my reactions to unfamiliar circumstances as they quickly change colours like oil on water. I think of each new place as a visit to a library, or a penny sweet shop, I think I am filing pieces of places away or shoving them messily inside a straining rucksack for a future story. It won’t always translate in the way I expect; a Thai train guard who shouted at me for making my own bed on a sleeper train will become a check-out girl in a Hackney, Tesco Metro who thinks customers always pack their carrier bags wrong. I want to think that these new things, from my beginning in Hanoi to Hackney to Paris, are the laying down of breadcrumbs or the planting of tiny, shining black seeds.

I used to call this curiosity the monkey on my back; constantly pulling at my hair, aroused and morbidly fascinated by everything I saw and experienced – it hasn’t always been a benevolent pet either. I’ve wondered recently if writers ever experience anything authentically, purely, without placing a narrative upon it, or plucking off the shiny bits for their collections like magpies. But maybe that’s a post for another time. ..

It’s no accident that writers often travel. Theroux, Sackville-West, Wolstonecraft, Capote, Fitzgerald, Greene and Hemingway are just the ones that instantly spring to mind. Writers are natural tourists: outsiders and scavengers of curious things. I return to the UK with work done and more work to do, a monkey on my back, a magpie nesting in my hair and a desire to stay a tourist for wee while longer yet.

See you back in London folks.