CHAPTER ONE Underneath the barrelled glass roof of the railway station, in a vaulted space as lofty as the nave of a cathedral, Brock waited on the bitterly cold platform, watching the crackling blue sparks, like malevolent St. Elmo’s fire, dancing around the pantograph of the advancing locomotive. The prospect of embarking upon this journey at such an unearthly hour had lost much of its appeal, ever since the insistent clamour of the alarm clock had ejected him from sleep. I

You’re a working-class writer: an oxymoron personified. Marx’s alienation made flesh. The year of the virus cast you further adrift when you jacked in your job with over three years left to run. It was a rash decision, but the right one in the circumstances. The sense of freedom was empowering, enriching. You were no longer dancing to anyone’s tune. By 2020 you’d already written four books, though none of them were selling. It’s a remarkable achievement, spanning four product

Although various factors are responsible for where you ultimately reside in the social pecking order, it isn’t hard to establish which is the most important. You can invoke intersectionality and play identity politics till the cows come home, but as far as I’m concerned, the overwhelming determiner of destiny is social class. As Anton says in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, “I dont have some way to put it. That’s the way it is.” If you’re middle class, you rank hig

Two weeks with no hot water or central heating takes a heavy toll. It’s a demoralising state of affairs. At one point, I even speculate how many kettles I would need to boil before I could fill the bath to a reasonable level. It’s a preposterous thought, and I dismiss the idea outright. Then I idly wonder whether I should heat some pans of water on the stove. Stop that right now! Instead, I fill the kettle and make do with washing myself in the sink. The tingling sensation of