MY PIECE OF THE CITY Writers get used to spending a lot of time alone, thinking stuff over, feeling moody. Indolence is indispensable, I have to remind my agent. When I lived in West Kensington between the mid-seventies and the late eighties, after I finished writing for the

IS IT DAY OR NIGHT? “Are you religious? How religious are you? Do you know what time it is? Is it day or night? Where are we? We need to find out how responsive you are.” Five strangers are sitting around my dining room table. I have been out of hospital for six weeks and these

NOTES ON A CARER To lunch in cool Queens Park with friends. It’s a relief to be invited somewhere – anywhere - leaving the neighbourhood, going in a taxi, looking at the world after a year, noticing what’s changed. But I can’t just take off on my own. My carer will have to

JURY DUTY Being a writer is mostly dull work, alone in a room tapping away. But there can be rewards and even perks, as I was to find out. It was 1992, and after writing three films, my first novel The Buddha of Suburbia had just been released in Italy. I received a call

WHEN LITERATURE WENT POP I was sixteen and at home with my mate Doug when we decided to run away. It was 1970 and one afternoon, feeling bored and excluded from the active world, and having seen the movie Woodstock – as well as knowing about the events of 1968 - we wanted to be

SUNNY AFTERNOON/BLACK DOG Nine in the evening and I am lying in bed watching TV on my laptop in my front room, Isabella sitting beside me in an armchair scoffing a vegan Magnum. The colour and noise of the screen begins to get bigger and harsher, as though someone is turning it

ADVENTURES IN THE TEACHING TRADE In my early twenties, when I became writer in-residence at the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square, it was taken for granted by the directors that I would teach. I was informed, somewhat casually, that I would run a group each week as part of

HOW MANY PEOPLE AM I? My mother liked to say that things would have been even worse had there been two of me. My twin brother, who apparently died at birth, would have been called Karim, so she said. Mum preferred not to talk about it – she found most forms of conversation a

IF NOT FOR YOU A few days after my accident, while in the ICU in the Gemelli hospital in Rome, I had a strong desire to write for the first time in months. I had to say something about what happened to me. I asked my partner Isabella if I could dictate my thoughts to her. At

NIGHTMARES AND KISSES He is still asleep when she gets up to have her yogurt and honey. She likes to eat privately in her narrow kitchen without being observed. Then she returns to bed, to read the Italian newspapers on her iPad. They are in Rome, in her apartment across the

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MAGNETS, MAGIC AND MUSLIMS “At eight o’clock this morning, a man in full Muslim garb came into my house and gave me a bed bath.” “So?” “So, it made me anxious, and I am going to tell you why.” Isabella is away in Rome visiting her parents. Maheen – an adorable, Pakistani

NAÏF IN THE UNDERWORLD I always encourage my friends, when they are due to visit, to stock up on vulgar and salacious gossip. I want them to fill my ears with the most horrible things they’ve ever heard. It’s quite a bar. Recently Carlo and I decided to interview an old friend,

MAN ON THE MOON Illness is a full-time job, a tyrant who orders your life, never leaving you alone. Luckily, I am in Tesco, head back, staring up at the monitor suspended from the ceiling. I wonder where I am in the frame until I spot myself, crawling into the corner, a black

STICKS AND BRICKS It’s remarkable anyone survives their childhood, I thought, as the physio barked in my face. A year ago, and I am in the hospital gym with a bulky, middle-aged physio, a likeable man who worked well with other patients, some of whom could barely move. I am

SITTING DOWN WITH YOU EVERYDAY HANIF: I was thinking we should have a conversation about what we do every day. How it produces work we couldn't have done separately. I couldn't have done all these blogs without you. You really pushed me. There's one blog we wrote about

A PAT ON THE HEAD As Sachin and I are heading towards Brook Green with our dog Cairo, where we will have an ice-cream at the café and watch people playing tennis, he begins to talk about a new phenomenon called “rawdogging”. This formerly obscene term now refers to the practice

DICKS AND TRICKS George, a middle-aged, bisexual friend of mine, living during the week away from his wife in a London bachelor pad, invited over a black male hook-up to insert the date-rape drug, GHB, into his anus. He liaised with the young man on Grindr who arrived promptly.

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