Smoking on the bench...

Having puffed away on the last few pages of The Smoking Diaries, I immediately jumped, or, rather, jounced, into Simon Gray's next instalment, The Year of the Jouncer (as a baby, Gray used to 'self perambulate' up the garden path in his pram by bouncing it about, much to the bewilderment of his parents who had left their infant outside on his own and returned to find the boy relocated). I closed the cover on that book in the bath last night. The postman will be bringing more Simon Gray to me this week - Enter A Fox and Fat Chance are en route, while the bookseller I've turned to is awaiting stock of the posthumously-published Coda (it has just dawned on me that I have failed to get my hands on a copy of the third volume in The Smoking Diaries - The Last Cigarette. I've just been on that internet thing and ordered it). I was telling another writer that I was reading Gray's memoirs the other day and I was somewhat taken aback that this fellow scribe had never heard of the man. He flicked through and found a pic, at the end of the book, of Gray sitting on a bench outside his home. "Looks like he's just a bloke sitting on a bench." A lot of writers are blokes too, of course, and very often do sit on benches. I've been promising myself for around three years that I'd buy these books but never got round to it. When I picked up the first one I thought it would be a nice treat in the downtime that I'd enjoy after delivering a draft of a script. Only there is no downtime, as I'm straight on to the next draft. So the rest might have to sit on the pile for a while. Or I might just go and sit on a bench and read them.

Find out more about The Smoking Diaries here.