Photo by Leah Kelley at Pexels.

The beauty of being snowed into a small village in Devon at Christmas is that there’s nothing much else to do but read. For my visit, I took down Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room, a beautiful story of rootlessness that I consumed with the same eagerness as the Christmas dinner kindly prepared for me. Also accompanying me on the trip were two Graham Joyce novels, The Limits of Enchantment and The Silent Land. I’m reading the latter to review but decided to take the former ‘to get me in the mood’. Joyce is a master storyteller and so I’ve been working my way through his list with the intention of learning from the master craftsman. One line in Enchantment struck a particular chord ‘you can get stuck and go to sleep in a corner of your life and then wake up seven or seventy years later and it was all gone’ and that ‘you could blink during one of your school days and then you blinked again and your own children were at school.’

Whenever I go away I always worry that I’ll run out of books so one of my presents to my girlfriend was Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores, a title which prompted a raised eyebrow from her mother. I explained that it was a story that celebrated amorous passions in old age and that we would send it down for her once read. The eyebrow lowered and a smile formed ‘more pudding?’ Having had my most recent rejection slip from Tindal Street inform me that ‘our reader felt your manuscript was extremely well written and very engaging, as well as humorous. Unfortunately, though…’ I can’t help but wonder what it would be like if Marquez was a debut author pitching his synopsis to an agent as it’s basically about an old man perving over a fourteen year old. But I guess when you’ve created something as beautiful as One Hundred Years of Solitude you can pretty much pitch anything.

When I was younger, I used to cement a visit to a new place by sinking an ale in the local. This was how I put circled on the map. Now I preserve my visits via literature. The sleepy Devonshire village in question was Upton Pyne which research informed me was frequented by Jane Austin in 1801 and 1802. Whilst here, she fell in love with a man who tragically died shortly after their encounter. Her suffering – as well as the beautiful landscape of the Barton Valley – would be conveyed in Sense and Sensibility (1811). As we trudged through the ten inches of snow on our daily walk (my partner insisting we have a break from reading) we passed Upton Pyne church where Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars were married in Austin’s novel and Pynes House, where the novelist stayed as a guest of the wealthy Northcote family. It is also, rather oddly, the village in which Five Leaves has had some of their books printed. It is a small world when all is said and done and literature offers me the comforting degrees of separation.

But the real treat of the break was Santa uploading a beautiful present to the Guardian website in the form of 12 short stories via download. Frank O’Conner’s My Oedipus Complex and Katherine Mansfield’s The Doll’s House come highly recommended. With regards to NYE resolutions, mine is to let go of my novel This is all I Know. It is time to ‘blink’. It’s with an agent at the moment so there is still a possibility, but after nine years of loving attention – in the most fulfilling relationship I’ve ever had, it’s time to move on and start afresh. It’s time for a play about the council that is long overdue and has been niggling away at me for years. I’m giving myself until March to finish it. It’s going to be tough switching mindsets, a bit like taking over from Fergie when he finally leaves United, but being disciplined and doing this is a test I need to set myself if I am ever to consider myself worthy of a title such as writer.

This Saturday I had the pleasure of giving a talk at Readers’ Day at the Council House to help support local libraries. My fee was instantly donated to Nottingham County Council for illegally driving in the tram line and later for being caught speeding 8 miles over the limit by a hidden camera. In the last two years I’ve forked out near on £1,000 in traffic fines and certainly won’t be demonstrating in Market Square if the highways department feels the pinch from Osborne’s scissors.

Although I would much prefer to rant about how many cameras there are in Nottingham, I will instead try and remain focussed on what was a lovely gathering of book geeks from across the city, proudly confessing their love for the written word.

My talk was about how my real parents, Robert Smith and Morrissey, turned me into an obsessive reader because it was through their lyrics I discovered Balzac, Braine, Camus, Delaney, Hall, Naughton, Sillitoe, Sitwell, White and many more. Wanting to know more about the context to the songs, I read the books they were based on or influenced by and soon discovered the kitchen sink dramas, beat generation and many other periods of literature that are now neatly filed according to genre across my bookshelves.

Of course my talk could have been on bureaucratic poetry or how getting so much correspondence from the council has improved my literacy skills and ability to comprehend legal jargon. Maybe in a few years I’ll do a talk on how traffic offences led me to Roland Barthes and semiotics. Or perhaps I’ll turn to crime fiction and find greater empathy for Moriarty, we do after all share the same forename.

My highlight of the day was meeting Armistead Maupin, author of Tales of the City, who was the first person to pen a character with AIDS and through his complex and hilarious characters, has helped to break down gay stereotypes. He shared a funny story about how his sister’s mother-in-law would place a bag over her head when visiting her gynaecologist, to retain her dignity. He later used this in one of his books and was giving a public reading when his sister and the said woman turned up. The woman turned to his sister and innocently said, ‘see I told you. I’m not the only one who does it’.

I wanted to grab a quick interview with Maupin but he was in such a rush I didn’t want to pester him. Instead I spoke to his publicist and forwarded on some questions which hopefully he’ll find time to answer as he shoots between readings on his UK visit. David Nicholls was another who slipped through the net, proving you need to be a bit heartless if you want to make it as a hack. In his talk he said he hated giving interviews and being asked the same questions over and over again but loved talks with readers such as now. I didn’t have the heart to approach him afterwards. Besides, there was a long queue of blushing females wanting to touch the hand of the man whose first novel, Starter for Ten, made it onto the Richard and Judy list and his most recent, One Day, is a romantic story following the varying fortunes of two people on the same day over the years. With its undertones of loneliness and fate, it reminded me a little of the false truths found by the museum curator in Jon McGregor’s So Many Ways to Begin.

I would have loved to have met Lindsay Clarke, the award-winning author of The Chymical Wedding, but we were reading at the same time and so he became my third failed interview of the day. Things weren’t quite working out as I had envisaged, a familiar theme. But in hindsight it’s probably best that I didn’t have to waste my evening transcribing interviews, not when there were more pressing concerns, such as giving my credit card details to an automated phone service in the highways management branch of my beloved council. Snip.