Diary - 6 September 2012 | 6 September 2012

In Edinburgh to speak about my new novel Zoo Time at the book festival. I love it up here, watching the rain lashing the austere grey terraces, dodging the street clowns who don’t really belong in so serious a place, visiting the Victorian dead in the marvellously voluble Dean Cemetery (it’s the stones that do the speaking, not the dead), and enjoying the view of Fettes from the window of my hotel. Built in the grand Scots baronial style to educate orphans and the poor, Fettes looks more like a lunatic asylum than a school. If I had a telescope I believe I’d be able to spot Mrs Rochester roaming through those spires, spitting and setting fire to herself. Tony Blair, who coincidentally referred to Gordon Brown as the mad wife in the attic, was a pupil of Fettes. Nothing beats a good start in life. The reason I relish speaking in Edinburgh is the seriousness of the audiences. Attentive listeners, astute readers, and uninhibited laughers. But then you have to be serious to get a good joke.

I can’t decide whether I still get a kick out of publication. Seeing your second book come out is not as exciting as seeing your first, seeing your third is not as exciting as seeing your second, and this is my 17th. I’m not jaded, but it’s brought home to me each time that the real satisfaction of writing is the writing, and the rest is but vanity, froth and disappointment. So why not finish one book and immediately start another, and let everything else — the interviews, the television appearances, the public readings — go hang? Because I like doing them, is one answer. But also because I think they’re necessary. As the written word suffers devaluation by the hour, the last pure pleasure available to a writer — after the act of writing itself, I mean — is the keeping open of live colloquy with readers.