Being an introduction to a book of rather wonderful photographs of refugees, How the World came to Oxford, taken by Rory Carnegie, together with their testimonies gathered and edited by Nikki van der Gaag, which was published by the Oxford Literary Festival.

I first saw Rory Carnegie’s photographs of young asylum seekers a couple of years ago at Modern Art Oxford. I have no memory of the rest of the exhibition, but those six photographs have been floating around the back of my mind ever since.

They’re included here (Albert, Amina, Behar, Daphne, Florence and Vassan) and you can probably see why I’ve found them difficult to forget.

It’s due, in part, to the way Rory photographed them. But, more importantly, it’s due to the way they look back at him. And at us.

They’re self-possessed, yet vulnerable at the same time. They sit in empty rooms, or stand in featureless gardens where nothing happens, but the threat of something hangs in the air.

You can see what I mean when you compare them with the pictures of some of the older people in this book. Mohammed Bushara, for example, or Annelie Rookwood. Time has slowed down in these photographs. The rooms are full of objects. These are people at home with themselves and with the world around them.

When you read the stories they have told to Nikki van der Gaag you begin to understand why the photographs are so powerful.

Becoming an asylum seeker is not something that happens to people by accident. We talk of people being forced to flee persecution in their home countries. But the brutal truth is that no-one is forced to flee. Fleeing is what you do if you have the guts to leave. Most people stay and hope for the best. But the best rarely happens. If they’re lucky, they lie awake at night waiting for the knock on the door. If they’re unlucky they’re killed, or tortured, or thrown into prison.

That’s the self-possession you can see in these faces. These are people who had the strength to do something most people are incapable of doing, leaving everything behind and starting their lives all over again in a country that often makes this very difficult indeed.

Read the testimonies and you will understand the vulnerability, too. Many of these people have seen their families, friends and neighbours killed. And many of them are still running.

Look how empty these houses are, and how few possessions these people have. A book. A football. A flag. A patterned throw. These are people who are fearful of putting down roots in case they have to move on again at a moment’s notice.

See how much more at ease everyone is inside their house, but how they still keep the curtains closed so that no-one knows they are in there.

Then notice how these things change as the years pass, as people get older, as they turn from asylum seekers into refugees, and from refugees into people who no longer think of themselves as refugees.

For this is the heart of the book.

Most people are wary of strangers. Tabloid newspapers have always sought to whip that wariness into fear. And governments, in turn, have always used that fear to win votes.

But time does its usual work. Wariness fades, newspapers get bored and it takes a great deal of effort to carrying on being frightened of something that offers no threat.

In fifty years’ time, it will be unremarkable to have a grandmother who escaped from Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. Just as it is unremarkable now to have a grandfather who escaped from Nazi Germany.

And this has always been true. If you think you have no refuges in your family it is because you have not looked hard enough, or because the records have not been kept.

This is not a book about how refugees are human beings just like the rest of us. Most of them have had experiences the rest of us cannot even begin to comprehend.

It is a book about how some extraordinary people become an important part of who we all are.

Albert and Amina

Behar and Daphne

Florence and Vassan

For the sake of completeness, really (see above)

This is the picture I sometimes add to signed copies of Curious:

I did it a few times in Italy, where it was not received as well. Though having done it, I now know the Italian for ‘Ah. With flies!’. Which I may be able to use in a restaurant one day.

Sometimes, when signing stock copies for Random House (2,500 was my record, I think; my wrist survived, but after seven hours bent over a book, my distance vision went a bit odd and I bumped into several people on the way back to the tube) I would relieve the boredom by adding a few of these drawings. Last year I met a woman who said she’d bought a signed copy of Curious. She was especially pleased because it had a drawing in it. A dead dog. And lots of little love hearts. I decided it would be unkind to disabuse her.

Being an addendum to the previous.

If you are American you may have read the last entry (The Many Wounds of Little George) and decided that I am in need of psychiatric treatment. Or incarceration. Obviously, you may be English, or Japanese, or Russian and have come to the same conclusion. But bear with me.

I lived for a year in Boston, MA., and became something of a connoisseur of minor transatlantic cultural differences.

Obviously, it goes without saying that irony is not one of them (Though there is a kind of earnestness which is more prevalent in the States, but which in the UK is generally confined to members of religious institutions. I remember vividly going into Borders one day in the Atrium Mall on Route 9, dumping my purchases beside the till and being asked, ‘And how are you today, Sir?’. I was not at my cheeriest and said, ‘You’re not really interested, are you?’ To which the reply came, ‘I’m one of the few people in retail who really do care’.)

Putting toilet humour aside, there were two areas where I most regularly put a foot very wrong.

I had not realised the extent to which many British people show affection for one another by being extremely rude. Nor had I realised how difficult it is to explain to someone that the phrase, ‘Three months in boot camp should sort you out’, is a comment one would only make to good friends and is not meant literally.

Nor had I realised that the world doesn’t share the British amusement with stories of pain, mutilation and trauma. There was, for example, a news story shortly after Bonfire Night last year, about a man who given himself serious colonic burns by launching a rocket from between his buttocks. I shared this story with various friends to universal amusement. When living in Boston however, I would sometimes read similar stories online and make the mistake of sharing them with American friends. The usual reaction was one of horror. Partly at the story itself. Partly at my laughter.

(Canadians, I found, were more partial to this kind of thing. Indeed, on one occasion, an American friend laughed uproariously at my story of someone accidentally stapling their genitalia to a plank, or similar, then stopped short and excused themselves on the grounds that they had ‘spent a lot of time with Canadians’).

Many years ago I was a student on a creative writing course, during which the tutor asked us to write a curse poem, addressed to anyone who had particularly annoyed us. We set to the task with gusto and an hour later we read out the poems we had produced. They were, on the whole, rather good, very funny and almost universally good-natured. Then an American man read out a poem about a neighbour whose dog routinely relieved itself on the grass outside his house. It was one of the most frightening poems I have ever heard. I forget the details. But weapons were involved and the neighbour did not live.

Now that I occasionally teach creative writing myself, I habitually steal workshop ideas from tutors who taught me (and hand on my own ideas to other tutors). But the curse poem is one I have decided to leave on one side.

So, to my American readers who have not spent too much time in the company of Canadians, a belated apology for the bleeding man. It was funny, honestly. If you happened to live in the right place.

It began at the Edinburgh book festival.

In the Author’s Yurt there is a guest book for visiting authors. Being an artist of sorts, and having been looked after very well, it seemed only proper that I illustrate my signature. By the time I got around to doing it, however, the stakes had been raised by another writer (I didn’t recognise the name) who had decorated an entire page with a meticulous and terrifyingly proficient life-drawing of the yurt’s interior. Realistic figures. Rigorous perspective. The lot.

Clearly I had to go for simplicity.

For the previous three years when signing copies of Curious Incident for friends I would add a drawing of a dead dog beneath a cloud of flies (it was more charming than it sounds). I wondered if I could concoct a similar drawing for A Spot of Bother. I decided eventually on a simplified graphic illustration of a central scene in the novel:

I did a large version in the guest book and some smaller versions in copies of the novel. I was growing rather fond of my little, bleeding man and found myself taking him on further adventures over the following weeks.

I began adding the pictures to the bottom of e-mails and one of my (nameless) respondents said how much she enjoyed my drawings. I explained that my aim was to proceed from amusing and relatively minor wounds to more graphic traumas that no-one could possibly find funny:

Our exchange ended with one of the most memorable e-mails I have ever received. BRING ON THE ANAL BLEEDING. Like that. In caps.

I brought it on.

Though it is the nipples that remain my favourite:

The sheer volume of blood. The mildly pissed off expression. The arms inexplicably raised. The intangible and almost certainly offensive religious symbolism that I can’t quite put my fingers on.

It seems to demand something more than a pen drawing. A T-shirt? A book cover? An edition of two-colour lino prints, perhaps…

(Swindon wins)

While I was writing Curious I had no idea that it would be published, let alone end up in a Faroese edition. It was my sixth adult novel (five remain unpublished, and with good reason), so I would keep my spirits up by indulging in the occasional fantasy of literary success. Writing my Booker speech, designing covers…

At one point, I remarked idly to Sos, my wife, ‘If it’s a bestseller, do you think I’ll get the freedom of the city of Swindon?’

She replied, ‘Not if they read the passage where Swindon is described as the Arsehole of the World’.

I told this story at the Swindon Literary Festival after the book had been published. There was laughter (thank God). Then, when the houselights came up for questions, I saw that the mayor of Swindon was sitting in the front row in all his regalia. His hand was raised.

The microphone was passed to him. ‘You have described our city as being like a lower fundament of the human body,’ he said. ‘If you were given the freedom of our city - and I stress ‘if’ - what would you do to improve it?’

It was one of the more difficult questions I have been asked.

I paused. ‘Well… I got here early tonight, as I always do before this kind of event, thinking I’d find a café and go over my talk with a cappuccino and a sandwich’. There was even more laughter (thank God). ‘So, I think a café Nero between here and the train station would make it pretty much perfect’.

Just before A Spot of Bother was published, I did an event at the Edinburgh Book Festival. I was asked about Peterborough. I said that I had spent one night there in order to check a few facts and added (unwisely, in retrospect) that it was ‘horrible, but not in a funny way’. I was perhaps a little harsh, but I think I could defend myself in a court of law. It has a beautiful cathedral and the countryside and villages to the West of the city are picture-postcard stuff. But the city centre has been throttled by a large car park and shopping centre complex which close down at the end of the working day (the same thing happened to Northampton where I grew up). I went into the city centre to get something to eat in the evening and found absolutely nothing, apart from an empty coffee bar which was, luckily, still open due to late-night shopping. I had my coffee and sandwich while they swept up round me.

A few weeks later, my quote was reprinted in a national newspaper (the name of which I shall withhold in case they decide to take the gloves off). For some reason known only to them, they added the phrase, ‘But the inhabitants of Peterborough are too lethargic to complain about the book’.

Peterborough local radio began a campaign to get the book banned from Waterstones in the city. The manager of Waterstones had to go on air to defend me. I had to thank the manager of Waterstones. I had to talk to The Independent who were running a news item about the row. In the article they wrote that I had been ‘quoted out of context’ (so now I know what that phrase means). The journalist Adrian Durham, who grew up in Peterborough, backed me up, saying, ‘I’d rather live in Beirut than go back’. Ian Hutton wrote to the Independent to say, ‘As an old Peterborian I would like to leap to the defence of Peterborough […] Unfortunately I can’t […] It now stands as an object lesson in how to ruin an historic city.’ Then someone from the local tourist office (I think) sent out a press release, saying, ‘Everyone is welcome to visit Peterborough. Except Mark Haddon’.

So that was my next summer holiday buggered.

Maybe we’ll go to Swindon instead.

Being a few of the most enjoyable questions I’ve been asked over the last four years, together with my answers

1. Name the best Simpsons episode of all time, and explain why it’s the best. (Ink Magazine)

‘Time and Punishment’, the one where Homer ‘mends’ the toaster, accidentally turns it into a time machine, and finds himself repeatedly sucked back to the Age of the Dinosaurs where he keeps squashing something, thereby altering the course of evolution with horrific consequences. There’s a crescendo of high-density jokes at the end which made me almost sick with laughter the first time I saw.

If I make any attempt to describe the jokes I’ll kill them stone dead. But anyone who’s seen the episode will remember the bit where it rains donuts.

Actually, to be precise, ‘Time and Punishment’ is a mini-episode contained with the ‘Treehouse of Horror V’ Halloween special, which also contains the rather wonderful ‘ Nightmare Cafeteria’ where the staff at Bart’s school are killing, cooking and eating the children…

2. Which are your favourite flavoured crisps, and why? (Guardian online Q & A)

I’ m not really a crisp kind of guy (though my wife quite rightly points out that if I have to buy crisps for any reason I am a sucker for any big bag with the words ‘hand-made’ and ‘gourmet’ on it). In truth, if I am going to indulge myself, white chocolate and flapjacks would be my unhealthy snacks of choice.

3. How important were your five unpublished novels to your development as a writer and eventual success? (Writer Magazine)

Hugely. Most of them were absolutely dreadful and coming to that realisation each time was not a pleasant experience. Curious Incident was a better book, I think, because I put into practice everything I’d learn when writing for children (brevity, humour, a well-shaped plot…). Doubtless if I got to the age of sixty with twenty unpublished novels in my bottom drawer I would be on a locked ward somewhere full of heavy-duty tranquilisers. But I now realise that I am in the enviable position of having spent a great deal of time under the bonnet (or hood, as you say). I know why my writing works when it works and I know why it doesn’t when it doesn’t. And that’s the kind of knowledge I don’t think you get if you are one of those writers who are blessed with a natural talent and produce a wonderful novel at twenty two.

4. Why did you decide on a poodle as the murder victim [in Curious Incident] - don’t you like poodles or are all breeds as likely to meet an equally horrible end in one of your novels? (Dogs Today)

I don’t bear a grudge against poodles per se, though if I had a dog it probably wouldn’t be a poodle. It is simply that, for some obscure reason, a dead poodle seemed funnier than a dead Alsatian or a dead Boxer (though come to think of it, a Jack Russell with a fork through it would also be quite funny). Oh dear, I’m going to attacked in the street by dog-lovers now, aren’t I.

5. Which are your models of Bildungsroman? (Italian Vogue)

None, to be honest. For the simple reason that I have a shamefully bad memory for the novels I have read. To take one example, I read Catcher in the Rye [occasionally cited as a model for Curious Incident] many years ago and can remember, quite literally, nothing about it. This is true of most of the thousands of novels I’ve read in my life. It used to scare me. Why spend so much time doing something if you can’t remember having done it? These days I realise it’s a blessing. If you can’t remember, you can’t copy. I now think of my brain as a compost heap. It’s not an efficient place to store stuff, but if you keep adding things to the pile it makes good fertiliser.

6. What activities/ideas/discoveries outside of your field most excite you? What makes you think, “Damn, I wish I thought of that?” (Seed Magazine)

Perhaps if I’d been born in the late 18th century and possessed a large private income I might have been able to fulfil one of my early childhood ambitions to become a scientist and attempt to make some great discovery, if only because that was a period in history when an intelligent young person with time on their hands and money at their disposal was still able to push back the frontiers of geology or astronomy or biology. But nearly all scientific discoveries in the last fifty years have come as a result of years of hard and often tedious labour illuminated by occasional flashes of insight. And that’s something I could never have done, if only because I have no eye for detail. You miss a zero out of a mathematical equation and it crashes through the guardrail into the ravine. You make a spelling mistake in a novel and it’s neither here nor there.

If anything, it is music which makes me think, ‘Damn, I wish I had thought of that’. Sometimes when I’m listening to a well-loved CD (whether it’s The Flaming Lips or Harrison Birtwhistle, Radiohead or Elliott Carter) I find myself moved almost to tears and wish I could have made something that wonderful. Being an amateur guitarist and viola player I can sometimes kid myself that it would have been possible if my life had been a little different. Though I do like a nice cup of tea and an early bedtime, so being in a band was never a genuine possibility.

7. What were your favourite books as a child? (Oh, loads of people)

Origins of the Universe by Albert H Hinkelbein.

I read very few picture books and very little fiction as a child (The Night Before Christmas, Diggy Takes his Pick, The Log of the Ark, a boxed set of Puffin war stories I got as a school prize but which I have no memory of reading…) Mostly I read encyclopaedias and science books. I knew that I was not butch enough to go into space, and at that time astronauts had all been fighter pilots in their previous jobs and Trained Killer was never an appealing career. So, for a long time, I wanted to be a paleoanthrolopgist searching for Australopithecus bones in the Rift Valley in Kenya. Stupid, really. These days, I find even Southern France too hot in the summer.

Writers, publishers, librarians… everyone interested in literature and education seems to believe that books are the golden gateway to personal fulfilment and productive citizenship. It’s a bit like footballers thinking everyone should play football. The important thing for any kid is to find a passionate interest, some way of making the world thrilling.

And if you love science and end up writing novels, well, there’s sure to be some way of marrying the two.

Because earlier this year I appeared on The Sky Book Programme to discuss, among other things, my favourite novel, so I reread it, for the eighth or ninth time, taking some notes because explaining why you like something is harder than explaining why you hate it, for me at any rate, but the interview took at least fourteen seconds (see above), and it seems a shame to waste all that pondering time.

Philip Pullman said (correctly) that studying literature at university equips you very badly for writing the stuff. You spend three years reading (often disconcertingly good) books, thinking about their relationship to the author’s life, their structure, their influences, their social context… Then you sit down to write a novel of your own and realize that you have never considered some of the basic questions. Who is narrating? Is it one of the characters? Or many? Is it you, or a dramatized version of yourself ? Do they have access to all the characters’ minds? Do they know they future? What is their relationship to us? Do they have an arm around our shoulder? Are they whispering conspiratorially? Are they standing in front of the fireplace declaiming…? Whether we like a book often depends on how an author has answered these questions.

And if the author writes well, we rarely notice how they’ve done this. For a good novel (or poem, or play) is a magic trick. The machinery works with such deftness that we’re too dazzled to notice the wires and the secret doors.

This is particularly true of To the Lighthouse. Yes, it’s about the clash of masculine and feminine world-views, the breakdown of the Victorian family, class, art, money, power… all that lit-crit stuff. But it’s the prose which dazzles me.

There is no narrator as such, more an narrating spirit which moves, with fairy quickness, in and out of people’s minds, and back and forth in both space and time. Sometimes it is hard to work out, immediately, who is thinking, or to put a date and time to the scene being described.

It sounds complex when spelled out (and one of things I love about Woolf is that she is a true Modernist, restlessly pushing at the boundaries of what fiction can do) but more than any other writer I can think of, she captures the sense of what it is to inhabit a human mind and to be a member of a family. The way our thoughts overlap and coalesce with those close to us, the way we complement and contradict one another.

She describes with absolute precision how the mind slips from the Wagnerian sublime to the trivial and back again without the slightest bump. You wonder if your life is a failure. You remind yourself to buy biscuits. You are entranced by the patterns in an oily puddle.

“How incongruous it seemed to be telephoning a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have joined hands in meadows of asphodel. Yes, he would catch the 10:30 at Euston.”

Then, every so often, that narrating spirit breaks through the membrane which keeps us from the seeing the true nature of things, and the world catches fire.

“Mrs Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air like a rain of energy, a column of spray…”

It happens, again, in one of my favourite passages, which keeps its power every time I return to it.

“There was the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured ship for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain on the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath.”

I’m an underliner. I don’t think I’ve ever really enjoyed a book without wanting to scribble in it, to highlight the passages where the wheels leave the tarmac. My tattered copy of To the Lighthouse has underlinings on nearly every page. And in different coloured inks. For every time you return to a really good novel you find yourself reading a slightly different book. This time around (being the father of two small boys), I realised just how good Woolf is at describing parents and children, that fierce tenderness, the see-saw of love and hate, the pride and the sadness, the closeness and the distance.

The novel also gets funnier every time I read it.

Here is Mr Ramsay, the paterfamilias, once again, trying to convince himself that his academic career has not been a failure.

“[His] was a splendid mind. For if thought was like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q […] But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmer red in the distance. Z is only reached by one man in a generation.”

Because it’s in the shops.

I won’t be writing much about A Spot of Bother here.

I talked far too much about Curious Incident. It has become like one of those favourite family stories that get told and retold and retold. I no longer remember much about writing the book, only what I have said about writing the book. Which is sad.

Besides, novels aren’t crossword puzzles to which you have accidentally forgotten to append a set of answers. If a writer knows their onions and their novel raises questions, that’s because the reader is meant to answer them (one of the more annoying questions that interviewers sometimes ask is, ‘Why does George do this?’, or, ‘Why does Christopher do that?’; well… because it seemed believable and appropriate, and if he didn’t then the rest of the plot wouldn’t happen).

In any case, if I like a writer’s work, I prefer to hear them talking about the other books they enjoy reading, their political opinions, their preferred flavour of crisps, the music they listen to… (I shall get around to all of those at some point below [1]).

Nevertheless, for those who want to know…

A potted answer to some of the questions which keep coming up:

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve written (or indeed why you wrote it) until many other people have read it. In retrospect, I realised that I was trying to write an artless novel (a number of reviewers simply thought I had forgotten to put any art in - which is a different kind of novel).

For all it’s seeming simplicity, Curious was tricksy. I wanted to write a novel with no tricks. Or to avoid the obvious ones. No literary showing off. No purple passages, no convoluted time schemes, no characters talking from beyond the grave, no thinking dogs, no mini-essays on cosmology…

I wanted to write about ordinary people living ordinary lives in an ordinary place, because they seldom feature in fiction and because it felt like fallow ground ready for harvest.

I didn’t want to write about fascinating characters having abnormal experiences in exotic locations, because it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking those things are the meat of the novel. I wanted to write about families, about love and marriage, about childhood and ageing, work, death, sex… the stuff that The Novel seems tailor-made for grappling with.

It’s an easy read and I put a good deal of work into making it an easy read, but most of that work went into making the work invisible.

Because there’s no authorial voice, it’s a little like eavesdropping on someone who lives down the road. Consequently, many readers tend to see it as a kind of mirror. For some it’s light and funny. For many, who have personal experience of some of the darker events in the book, it’s painful. Middle-aged men tend to describe it as a book about a gentlemanly middle-aged man going quietly mad on account of his self-centred wife and impossible children. Middle-aged women tend to describe it as a book about a passionate woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a self-centred man and tied down by her impossible children. Several gay men have told me that it’s a relief to read a book which contains a young gay man who is entirely ordinary. English readers, on the whole, think it’s a book about growing old. Every singe Italian interviewer has told me that it is a book about love.

Much to my amusement, even those interviewers who have clearly not liked the book a great deal, have nevertheless gone on to talk about the characters as if they are real people they know intimately.

And that, I think, is all for now (more Spot-related facts will doubtless leak out later), except to say that the rear cover of the UK hardback bore a small silhouette of a dog, despite the fact that there is only one dog in the story, and its role is extremely tangential. The US hardback cover showed a silhouette of a wedding cake. On top of the cake are silhouettes of the six main characters… and a dog

One day I will write a novel called Cat, and they will put a picture of a dog on the cover.

[1] See White Chocolate and Flapjacks.

Hot tips for anyone entering the lion’s den.

1. Only Smaller

Many years pre-Curious my wife and I were walking down Broad Street in Oxford when she pointed to the window of the Blackwells Children’s Bookshop. My four Baby Dinosaur books were on display.

I was very excited. I’d never seen any of my books in a shop window before. My wife, however, who is always quick to puncture any delusions of grandeur I might be harbouring, said, ‘Just think. If you ever become famous, people will point at you in the street and say, Look, there’s Mark Haddon, only smaller’.

The truism is half-true. It’s not that television makes everyone seem larger. It’s that television makes everyone seems pretty much the same size [1].

Some years ago I wrote the script for the BBC’s adaptation of Fungus the Bogeyman, starring, among others, Fay Ripley and Martin Clunes. I visited the set on a number of occasions and was surprised to discover that she came up to his navel (I may be exaggerating slightly). When I walked round to business side of the operation and looked through the monitor however, the difference in their heights seem to have been equalised by the Magic of Television©.

For the record, Martin Clunes, who appears to the viewer as a loveable man with a face made of sausages, is in real life quite strapping and unexpectedly good looking. Fay Ripley looks exactly the same, only smaller.

2. Was that it?

Appearing on television is like falling off a building. One moment you’re thinking, ‘Shit. It’s a long way down’. The next you’re lying on the pavement.

If people being interviewed on television sometimes appear gormless or talk only in fatuous soundbites, it is not necessarily because they gormless or fatuous (though, obviously, some people are both [2]) . It is often because there is simply no time to think.

I was once flown to New York to do a high-profile breakfast television interview which cannot have lasted for more than a minute. Moments before we came on air I looked at the monitor and saw the preceding advert for Nestlé, who sponsored the show. I have spent many years boycotting Nestlé products (for reasons which you can discover here) and the slightly fazed look on my face during the interview was caused by me thinking, ‘Shit. I shouldn’t be here and now it’s too late to do anything about it’.

The only blessing is that…

3. Say Cheese.

Nobody really listens to what people say on television. Not unless they’re saying something bizarre or offensive (Gavin Esler’s wonderful interview with Mark E Smith after John Peel’s death springs to mind).

You look at someone on television and you decide, pretty much instantly, whether you like them or not. It’s like fancying someone at the supermarket checkout. It’s takes, oh, at least a second.

So… sit up straight, check your flies, don’t wear a comedy tie, smile pleasantly and suppress any Tourette’s style temptation to go down in broadcasting history.

And if you’ve just won a major book award and someone pokes a camera into your face, be polite. You’re talking to thousands of potential readers, not to the annoying person with the microphone. Scowl and you’ve just lost the sales that would have paid for the loft conversion.

4. There were Three People in this Marriage.

I don’t like hearing my answerphone messages. And I’m not keen on photos of myself. Being on television, and then accidentally seeing the result, is for me a queasy combination of both, with the added embarrassment of seeing how others have been seeing me for the past twenty-odd years.

It’s slightly better now, if only because I have learnt to iron out some of my more inappropriate on-screen behaviour.

I used to gesticulate and used my eyebrows a lot, believing this would give me ‘character’. It made me look as if I had taken amphetamines.

I used to pause between sentences (which I do in real life, much to my wife’s annoyance). I suspect that I do it to give the impression that I’m thinking deeply about what I’m going to say next. But television speeds time up (see above) and a pause between sentences can feel longer than the weather forecast. Do it twice and they cut to the item about the sheepdog that can play the piano.

I also used to slump, in an effort, I think, to make myself appear less visible. But the only way of being less visible on television is to be on the radio instead. Slumping makes you look like an overweight gnome. My mother was right. Sit up straight.

Most important of all, I have finally stopped tilting my head. It was what Princess Diana used to do. I think some part of my unconscious wanted to appear loveable and winsome, much as some part of her unconscious wanted to appear loveable and winsome. It was not a great look, even when she did it. It made me look as if I had some unresolved spinal problem.

5. The Evil Filter

There are some lovely people on television, who will help elderly ladies across the road and safely babysit your children. And there are some sociopaths. But they keep their jobs because they are able to remain calm and articulate while a producer screams into their earpiece, ‘Keep talking! Your next guest has had a heart attack in the green room! ’.

There is something deep inside the circuitry of the television camera, however, which makes it almost impossible to distinguish one kind of presenter from another when you are sitting on a sofa in Glasgow. When you walk onto a set, however, you can tell almost immediately.

Several years ago, I was asked onto BBC Breakfast TV to talk about my poetry collection, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea. Just before I sat myself down in front of the cameras I was told that the next two guests were both stuck in traffic and I might be talking for longer then I expected.

Now, whilst time usually moves at incredible speed on television (see above), when things go wrong it can slow down to an almost geological pace, much as it does when you’re involved in a road accident. And it seemed to me that talking about poetry on breakfast television for an indefinite period with two people who had not read my book was a good candidate for an on-screen road accident. I braced myself and sat on the sofa next to Dermot Murnaghan and Natasha Kaplinsky and realised, almost instantly, that they helped old ladies across the road.

To my amazement they had read the book and liked it and we chatted and time rolled on and I read a poem and it was rather like sitting in someone’s living room. And then the Minister for Releasing Dangerous Criminals into Society (or somesuch) finally arrived and I was allowed to go and felt slightly disappointed.

As for the sociopaths… you’ll have to track me down and buy me a couple of pints and sign a legal disclaimer before I part with that information.

[1] This is why, despite the considerable effort that has gone into making him seem tall, Hagrid’s height is never convincing (nor, indeed, is Madame Maxine’s).
[2] Occasionally they are the wrong person altogether.