A Question About Apostrophes

Don't think that the irony is lost on me. This morning I rant about would-be writers pestering me and this evening I'm asking a question that would-be writers might be able to answer. Alternatively, this one is for those with degrees in punctuation or jobs in editing and are willing to answer the question of an aging amateur hack.

Is there anybody out there who can explain the following?

I’m currently reading ‘London Fields’ by Martin Amis and at the beginning there’s a bit that has me confused. He writes:

“There followed some more information about the perfumes, ‘Scandal’, ‘Outrage’, and minor lines called Mirage, Disguise, Duplicity and Sting, and beneath, in double quotes, accompanied by an address and telephone number, with misplaced apostrophes: Keith’s the Name, Scent’s the Game.” (Martin Amis, ‘London Fields’, p. 12)

Now, I’ve been pondering this all day and I still haven’t figured it out but what ‘misplaced apostrophes’?

I thought an apostrophe indicates either possession or omission. Here, in both cases, doesn’t the apostrophe represent the missing ‘i’ of ‘is’? ‘Keith is the name, Scent is the Game’? Or have it all wrong and I must go back to basics and learn how to use an apostrophe?

Of course, there might be some super intelligent textual game the narrator or Amis is playing.

And while I’m about it: why are ‘Scandal’ and ‘Outrage’ enclosed in single inverted commas but Mirage, Disguise, Duplicity and String go unpunctuated?

The Nanus And The Ladyboys

You must never be ashamed to admit that you don’t believe half of my stories. Life in the celebrity vacuum is unreal and it will often be unlike anything you’ve experienced in your everyday lives. After all, how many have you ever watched Stephen Fry fire a flaming arrow into a 300 page manuscript soaked in petrol and pushed out onto a beaver-infested lake, complete with a dam built from the half-chewed remains of the ‘This Morning’ map?

More than the fame which accompanies them, a certain degree of rewriting also goes on when I set my fingers to type my stories. Like any author working on his own biography, I can choose to elaborate upon the truth or omit a compromising detail. What is left, however, is as close an approximation to reality as any political diary or celebrity memoir picked from a bookshop’s shelf. Take yesterday as a perfect example. You might not believe what I’m about to tell you but the following is a page ripped from the book of verisimilitude. It positively bulges with fact. In other words: this is pretty much exactly as it happened. I really couldn't make this up.

Oversleeping is usually a good indication that I’m about to have a bad day. Other clues involve discovering the Madeley zipper stuck at 10%, the loss of a vital piece of equipment (which is always likely when my fly is at 10%), verbal misunderstandings with Canadians, or any incident that involves a person of diminutive stature. Yesterday, in one way or another, I lived through all five, and yet the day didn’t turn out too bad.

Sleeping through my alarm clock's histrionics happens too often when I stay in Manchester. Rooms in cheap hotels hardly encourage you to lift your eyelids at six o’clock in the morning. From the deepest slumbers where all things are made of Feltz, I am suddenly thrown into the grey business-end of an economy-class Bunkhouse Dreary. Only an insomniac sadist would deny me the right to roll over and bury my face in my pillow for another fifteen minutes.

Yet having missed many appointments this way, I have devised many redundant systems to ensure that I don't sleep till noon. Judy's elbow is usually in the first line of that defence. The last is the travel alarm which I leave in the bathtub. In a good cast-iron tub, the sound from that little beauty gets focussed into a funnel of noise that can peel the wallpaper from the ceiling, disable communications satellites and neuter low flying pigeons.

I imagine a few of Manchester’s pigeons grabbed for their valuables at 7.15 yesterday morning. Three seconds later, I stumbled back from the bathroom and began to thread my ankles into my trousers. I was relieved to see my knees follow and I breathed a sigh of relief once my belt gave my narrow hips a squeeze. A quick brush of the teeth, a dab of gel on the old mop, and I was then running around my hotel room to pack my bags and pick up all the machinery vital to living in a city far from a woman called Judy. My Bluetooth enabled headphones, mobile phone, notebook, pen, Army issued switchblade, Oddie-licensed duck call, hygienically cured ear trumpet, eye drops, flint and steel for making a fire, and a length of waxed string. It was all there.

Except for my mp3 player which had mysteriously gone missing.

The last time I remembered using it was when I was trying to get to sleep the previous night. Mozart could never have imagined how well his 'Magic Flute' could drown out the sound of the Ladyboys of Bangkok whose show was taking place in the car park across the road from my hotel room. As I began to search for my mp3 player in the sheets of the bed, I begin to vaguely remember throwing it across the room in the middle of the night.

Without music to calm me, the city becomes a hostile environment. I spent fifteen minutes searching for the player before I had to give it up as lost. By then I was woefully late for the office. I endured a tram journey into the city centre that was memorable only for the endless tannoy announcements, chatter of passengers, the noise of traffic... I suffered the full 'humanity experience' and when I jumped off the tram, I then had to endure the insults of builders who made comments about the state of my zip which I had left semi-elevated.

It was what is known as an arse of a morning, or what we in Channel 4 like to call a ‘Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’.

Work on ‘Eye of the Storm 2’ went relatively well and by four o'clock, I was finished for another week and I left to catch the Virgin Pendolino back down south. Luckily, we’d already recorded Thursday’s 'Richard&Judy Show' so I had no reason to get back early. However, to preserve the illusion that the show is live, Channel 4 executives demand that I remain in disguise whenever I’m in public during the hours of 4.30 and 6.15PM.

I made the train in plenty of time but I was disappointed to discover that my seat was the airline type whose front was to the back of the one in front. My mp3 player still lost, I had to settle myself in a cramped seat for a two hour journey. The only consolation was that it would be heavy with Graham Greene. I had picked up a copy of ‘The Heart of the Matter’ after hearing Amis talk about it the other night. When the train began to move, I was looking forward to reacquainting myself with Greene’s voice. I spread out my legs into the well of the vacant seat next to me and I sank back expecting bliss.

And that’s when a late arriving passenger appeared at my side and began to push a large suitcase into my leg space. I was about to say something when I looked up. Only I didn’t have to raise my chin very far. For this was a nanus or a small person.

Like many of the small people I’ve known in my life, he was extremely well dressed and, as I would soon discover, unerringly polite and extremely intelligent. His black flat cap looked rather fetching against the tan of his waistcoat and his face radiated a smile. I radiated back.

He pushed his luggage further into the well of the seat and I tried to move my legs out of the way.

He smiled again but this time with the recognition that he was putting me to some trouble.

‘You’ve got very long legs,’ he said in a thick Canadian accent.

I didn’t know how to reply. Life has a habit of forcing me into these situations when I risk being too quick witted for my own good. Situations that any normal person would consider unreal are, to me, everyday. A Canadian dwarf was commenting on the size of my legs. And how did I feel? I felt terribly hurt.

‘Must you always go on about my height?’ I scolded him. ‘“Oh, isn’t he tall? Look how big he is!” I know what you’re thinking. Always chattering among yourselves and thinking I can’t hear you. Well I can hear you. I see the looks on all your faces. And I have feelings too. I’m a human being, for God’s sake...’

Humour is always the best way to build bridges. Even little bridges with low hand rails.

The man laughed and I knew at once that we’d be fine. He sat down (though ‘down’ was more of a ‘clamber up’) and we began to talk. It turned out that he was a rep for a large Korean electronics company and had finished a trade show in Manchester where he’d been demonstrating their latest products. He showed me the catalogue from his bag and I mentioned that I’d been up in the city to see the James Wood / Martin Amis lecture. He said he was sad to have missed it.

‘Mind you,’ he added. ‘I’ll be glad to get home.’

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘And why’s that?’

‘It’s those goddamn Ladyboys,’ he replied. ‘I’ve not had a wink of sleep all week. I tried to change rooms but the hotel said they were fully booked.’

I gave a snort of derision. It seems that I wasn’t the only man in Manchester to have suffered from the vocal warbling of Thailand’s finest female impersonators. ‘You too? I’ve had exactly the same problem. An utterly miserable weekend which only got worse this morning when I lost my new Bluetooth mp3 player.’

He winced. He obviously knew what it’s like to lose a Bluetooth connection.

‘I couldn’t take it anymore,’ said my friend. ‘If I had to listen to one more chorus of “My Shlong On The Mekong” I might have lost every inch of my postmodern liberal sensibility and told them a few home truths about gender identity...’

‘Ooh,’ I said. ‘You can’t say that...’

‘Don’t worry,’ he replied. ‘I can say that. I was actually born a woman.’

I looked at his in utter astonishment. 'Really? That's amazing.'

‘Got you!’ he said, bursting out into laughter.

I smiled but felt rather uncomfortable, not knowing how to take the humor of a politically incorrect nanus.

It turned out that Eric – for that was my new friend’s name – had been staying in the same Sheraton Of The Ever So Noisy as I had slept in the night before and that the problem of inebriated Ladyboys singing late into the night was the perfect subject to bring two strangers together on a long train journey. We chatted for an hour or so and once the express passed Birmingham and left the North, I began to savour the aroma of the south. That’s when I thought it time to reveal myself to my small friend.

‘Eric,’ I said, ‘I want you to prepare yourself for a shock.’

He looked at me. ‘You’re not a ladyboy?’ he laughed.

‘Better than that,’ I said, ripping off my fake nose and comedy pimple. ‘I’m actually Richard Madeley!’

He gasped, a small terrified yelp of a gasp. Pocket-sized surprise.

‘And who is Richard Madeley, exactly?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I’m quite big in the UK. My wife and I have our own show on Channel 4. If you weren’t leaving the country, we’d have had you on. Show your products to the nation...’

‘So you’re in TV?’ he said. His eyes had filled with the usual Gods-come-down-from-Mount-Olympus look of excitement. ‘That’s great because I have a fantastic idea for a TV game show.’

‘I doubt if you do,’ I told him. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many times I’m told about the next big idea but do you know how many are ever made?’

‘No idea,’ he said.

‘Nearly all of them. So fire away, little buddy of mine.’

He took a deep breath and puffed out his cheeks. ‘Barrel-O-Monkeys,’ he said.

I paused. I nodded. It had the advantage of being one I’ve never heard before.

Eric explained. ‘Back in Canada, it's very popular with the kids. It's an old game with plastic monkeys in a barrel. You have to try to pick them out using a fishing hook.’

‘I can’t quite see how you’re giving this a unique televisual twist, Eric,’ I told him, trying to let him down as gently as I could. ‘TV is about spectacle and, no offence intended, I don’t think watching a small chap like yourself hooking plastic monkeys from a barrel with a fishing rod is going to bring in much of an audience. It might work on ITV3, of course, but who would really want that audience?’

‘Ah but Richard,’ he replies, ‘what if we use real monkeys?’

Damn it! The dwarf had a point but the conductor was already announcing our imminent arrival at Euston. I knew I had to act quickly. I gave Eric my card.

‘You’ve got an amazing talent there, Eric,’ I said. ‘This Barrel-O-Monkeys idea might be a winner. When you come back to England, you must look me up.’

His brows narrowed. ‘That some sort of joke?’

I bit my lip.

He smiled. ‘Got you!’ he said and pointed at me.

And hadn’t he just? Again...

'Why...' I began but he waved me back.

‘Here,’ he said, reaching into his bag. ‘Take this to replace the one you lost.’

And with that he handed me a brand new mp3 player. A model not yet on the market and only slightly soiled by handling on a trade show floor.

‘I couldn’t take your only sample,’ I said as I stuffed it under my shirt.

‘Remember, Dick,’ he said. ‘Barrel-O-Monkeys...'

'It’s a sure winner,’ I said as we both stood up to leave.

He seeme unhappy to see me go but I had to rush since Judy would be waiting for me in the car park. Eric waved and waved back as I walked down to the end of the train. And there in Euston I left behind the one person you would always want to sit next to on a long train journey from Manchester. Witty, wise, a great instinct for TV, and he left me plenty of leg room.

Viewing Martin Amis From Behind A Comedy Pimple

When Martin Amis appeared on stage, I cursed my luck. Virgin’s InterCity had got me to Manchester far too late. A dash from Piccadilly and I had arrived at the University five minutes before the debate was due to begin. So much for seat A2. I was forced to sit a dozen rows back and there was no chance that Martin would recognise me through my false nose and beret. It was the eternal dilemma of the celebrity in a non-celebrity guise: I’d be unable to reveal myself to my old friend and sparring partner for fear of causing a stampede of unpublished writers desperate to get into our Book Club. The situation was familiar yet still so frustrating.

I was in Manchester to work but I had arrived a day early to attend the Centre for New Writing’s Public Debate on the subject of ‘Literature & Belief’. I’d had barely made it. I was still out of breath when the porter of Whitworth Hall climbed up on stage and welcomed those of us packed beneath the gothic ceiling.

Balding and set heavy in the middle like an unexploded beer barrel, the porter had a broad Lancashire accent that fell over us like pint glasses down a coal chute.

‘I’d like to welcome you ladies and gentlemen to Whitworth Hall,’ he said, ‘but before we start the evening’s entertainment, I want to discuss a few matters of housekeeping...’ Which meant that he proceeded to locate the toilets and give us some helpful advice about escaping the building in the case of a fire. It amounted to him warning us that once all best-selling authors were out of the room, it would be every man for himself.

‘And so, with no more ado,’ he continued, ‘I want to thank you all for coming and I hope you enjoy the entertainment we’ve got lined up for you this evening...’

I had the strange feeling that a game of darts was about to begin and as I began to search the room for Peter Manley, I didn’t notice that Martin Amis had already walked up onto the stage.

As the room fell silent, I looked up and heard a loud sarcastic voice announce ‘game on, ladies and gentlemen, game on...’ The woman to my side elbowed me in my ribs. She told me to be quiet.

Amis always surprises me. He’s of slight build but his head is large as though it has rolled off some hill on Easter Island. Constructed in clay by a sculptor with big thumbs, he has an appearance that makes you suspect that God himself took a hand in creating this caricature of the perfect literary type. The lines of his face are strings of flesh held together by eyes that rarely engage the audience. His gestures are slow. His right hand hangs from his wrist as though it’s weighed down by an invisible cigarette. Most alarming is the way he wears his spectacles on a chain around his neck. There is something of the village shopkeeper about his manner. Touch my produce and you should really consider buying, he seems to be saying.

He was followed on stage by James Wood, who was actually the main reason I’d bought a ticket to the event. Wood’s recent book on ‘How Fiction Works’ is one of the best pieces of literary criticism I’ve ever read. Wood appeared less at ease in the surroundings. Balding, round featured, and with a gentle calm, he seemed much more amiable than Amis, that demonic tobacconist. When Amis brooded, Wood looked merely nervous, though his opinions were always confident. His right hand rarely moved from his chin and his body language was that of a man more at home in his study. He was still peering out from behind his books, throwing gems to an audience probably there for the man from Easter Island.

Yet as far as his prepared statements went, Wood had the more interesting things to say in the first half of the debate. He explained how he suspected that literature’s rise caused many of the doubts about Christianity at the end of the twentieth century. I agreed with him, to a point, though I think popular culture has had much more to do with it. Judy is far more significant that Zadie Smith, for example.

For me, the second half of the debate was edged by Amis who made some delightful allusions to two of my favourite writers, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. After an hour, I was orgasmic with ideas and when it was time to open the debate up to questions from the floor, I was first to wave my hand. Unfortunately, I think my bright blue beret, false nose and comic pimple were not to the moderator’s liking. I clearly looked too sane. With hindsight, I should have been prepared for what followed. Somewhat naively, I thought that the people of Manchester would not waste the chance to ask five decent questions of two of the sharpest critics of literature in the last twenty five years.

How wrong I was...

The first question amounted to some confident fellow sporting a quality beard explaining how he felt dispirited that his faith was continually under attack from the likes of Richard Dawkins. It was only natural, I suppose, that from this he wanted to know: ‘could the two distinguished speakers tell me if they think I should write a book like Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” or something by C.S. Lewis?’

Amis gave him a look loaded with buckshot. ‘How dare you finger my quality shag tobacco!’ I thought he would reply.

‘I think you should ask a higher authority about that’ is what he did say.

It was a better answer than the question deserved. Unexpected too since I doubt if there are any higher authorities than Amis. Wood, however, was much more polite. ‘I think you should try to write allegory,’ he said and sounded like he meant it. But doesn’t that just mark the man? He probably catches moths and sets them down beside open windows before putting on some quiet cello music to help them on their way.

As I winched up my lower jaw after the sheer banality of the first question, the second was being asked from the front row and I had missed my chance to grab the radio microphone.

‘I have written a book,’ began a woman who I couldn’t see from where I sat but probably looked quite earnest, ‘and it is still unpublished...’

‘No surprise there,’ I muttered to the amusement of a few around me.

‘In my book...’ And here I have to ask you to insert some generic hokum. I really can’t remember much of the nonsense that came out but I think it might have involved elves. ‘But my question is... I recently had a dream in which I dreamt that that I was standing here asking you gentlemen on the stage if you could tell me what a perfect world would look like. So, could you tell me what a perfect world would look like?’

I forget what answer came from the stage. I had pretty much had enough of it by now. Two questions wasted and I was in no mood for stupidity. Unfortunately, nobody had told this to the person asking the third question.

‘I am the lost woman from the Book of Ezekiel!’ she said, her voice bellowing it out like a railway bomb alert. I zoned out pretty quickly and I noticed that neither Amis nor Wood wanted to answer the lost woman from the book of Ezekiel. I could see why she was lost and I felt pretty bad for Ezekiel.

The fourth question was the only decent question of the evening and related to Dickens. Both Wood and Amis answered it well and Martin did tell a nice anecdote about Greene that I hadn’t heard before. However, even as he was speaking, I knew that I must act. If I wanted to ask my question, I needed to wave like I’d never waved before. And this time I also gave a cough to attract the attention of the panel.

And it worked... to a degree. The moderator looked my way, smiled a thin evil smile and then pointed to a woman on the other side of the hall.

‘The last question, I’m afraid,’ said the man who I suspect has some vendetta against pimpled men in berets.

‘I think the panel don’t have a clue about postmodern Christianity...’ began the last interrogator. I wanted to shout ‘bollocks’ but I resigned myself to sighing loudly as I slowly sank down into my seat.

There was nothing for it. My ears ached as I listened to another question woefully inadequate for the quality of the brains up on the stage. Shortly after, the event broke up and I was left with my question about dogma, art and morality unasked. Amis and Wood were whisked off to wherever it is that a university fills their honoured guests with cheap wine and I was left to trudge the long way back to my hotel room. As I walked through the night, the glowing red sign of the Palace Hotel far behind me, I felt so terribly lonely. I suppose that’s why I rang Judy on my mobile.

‘Had a good evening?’ she asked. ‘Did you get to speak to James Wood? And how was Martin?’

‘They blanked me,’ I said as the Manchester rain began to fall. ‘They were off the stage before I could get James Wood to sign my book. I hate this city. The people here are mad! Do you know that, Judy? Absolutely mad!’

I turned up the steps of my hotel just off Princess Street. The view from my window was onto the Sackville Street car park that had been turned into a mini Thailand. ‘I’m not going to get a bit of sleep,’ I told her as I climbed the stairs. ‘The Ladyboys of Bangkok are playing in the car park across the road and all I can hear are the strange laments of men with large breasts and thick makeup.’

Judy fell silent. ‘Sometimes, Richard, I just wish you would tell me the truth instead of making up all these silly stories... You don't honestly expect me to believe that there are Ladyboys in the car park opposite your hotel?’

I was too tired to tell her that this was the absolute unadorned truth and that in order to understand the madness of Manchester, you really have to hear every dumb question, see every heavily corseted young adult male, and you really have to see life from behind a false nose and a comedy pimple.

A Dennis Update

This morning's early rise had done nothing for my mood and I had hoped to catch a bit of shut eye this afternoon before I recorded tonight's show. The last thing I wanted to do was spend my time pondering whether on not to give Dennis his notice. Of course, he did the usual craven things to stay in my employ. He fell on his knees and begged me to let him keep his job. His one hand clawed ineffectually at my trouser leg as I walked away but I was not going to be swayed. If there's one subject in the world that is sure to get my temper up it's the subject of Castro and Cuba. Second to that is darts. It's a pernicious evil that threatens to reintroduce bad shirts and jewellery for fat men.

Now that I'm home and I've read your appeals on Dennis's behalf, I've changed my mind. I'll ask Dr. Raj to have a word with him and disillusion him about Peter 'The Hedgehog' Manley and Phil 'The Power' Taylor. After all, the unfortunate introduction of darts into this blog was partly my fault. Richard 'The Master' Madeley shouldn't have promoted Dennis so rapidly through the ranks. There were others who could have filled in for me today. I could have called in a favour from Jeremy 'The Rocket' Clarkson and had him write me something. I could even have pressed Martin 'The Professor' Amis into producing a small piece to make up for spelling Lola's name wrong in the interview I published earlier this week.

So, those of you who supported Dennis can rest easy tonight knowing that you've saved a one-armed man from the unemployment queue. Naturally, I would have replaced him with somebody with two hands, so, in terms of limbs, you've stood in the way of a real world decrease in the number of idle hands. You might want to think about that the next time you take the side of a man who whispers whenever he mentions Jockie Wilson's name.

'In The Tabernacle of the Bald God' by Martin Amis

Richard writes: "When I drunkenly stumbled into Professor Martin Amis at Maureen Lipman's cheese and wine party last month, I was ready to blame an excessive number of elbows in the room for my slight trip. The last thing I wanted to do was pay for the dry cleaning of an expensively ruffled jacket and corduroy trousers. I needn't have worried. Martin laughed off the stain, which he said delighted him because it was the same shape as the mole on Philip Roth's thigh, and instead asked me for an interview. The deal was struck there and then, and this is the result."

An aluminium bullet propelled me from Manchester to London. It carried the cordite stench of the intercity commuter train; a two hundred mile per hour slug rattling around the cranial cavities of canting fools whose scything fingers lay waste to lines of unkempt prose and words that die minuscule deaths between the covers of business reports, feasibility studies, and the cadaver-like morbidity of the end of year accounts. Solzhenitsyn one wrote of the moment when the 'soul, which formerly was dry, [...] ripens with suffering'. I was about as far from the Gulag Archipelago as you could get but I was also on my way to watch a man ripe with rich agonies of his very own.

An hour later, I'm sitting watching cameras shuffle softshoe across the floors of a subdued studio in South London. I've become enchanted by the insoluble piety of the place. At my side, sits a devote woman and her flask. She is knitting a cardigan big enough for a Sherman tank. She tells me that her name is Brenda before she turns to me, mid-purl. 'It's for Richard,' she says, her breath scorched by hot Darjeeling. 'He always looks so cold.'

The Richard in question is Richard Madeley, talk show host, polymath, and the man credited with the discovery of butane. 'That was many years ago,' he smiles when I later remind him of his origins in petrochemicals. 'I was trained as an organic chemist. Judy says it's now chemistry of a different kind but I still find it odd to be working in daytime television. I miss my pipettes.'

I want to tell him that he does more than work in daytime TV. To women like Brenda, he is the daytime. Though not for very much longer. He has invited me here to record the end of his decade-long imprisonment. I'm there to act as his witness: to sit and attest to his virtue in this tabernacle built for Brenda and the other knitting Gods of Middle Age. Bearing witness would be easier if the master of the television talk shows approached his premature retirement with a little more dignity.

I had found him stalking menacingly at the fringes of a circle of producers. Richard is a beast of capacious energy, occasionally lashing out at any who dare invade his space. One of the show's researchers runs away, her sobs echoing long after Richard had rebuked her for bringing him Marmite instead of coffee. Caffeine is his drug of choice. It's why I took my seat beside Brenda. Caffeine addicts are better left in their zone of jittery expectation. An hour later, I'm still there, watching Richard finish another show.

'Great show, guys! We should get that paraplegic brass band on again,' he announces as he drops down off the set and waves me over. His wig has slipped. I haven't the heart to tell him. Friends had advised me that he's a man whose vanity gorges on his charm. He lives an eccentric's life; dashing between emergencies as unnatural as his brow that never sweats, even when layered with a hairpiece weaved from the bristles of a mildly albino badger. On the phone earlier that morning, he had explained how Stephen Fry had helped him shave his head during a orgy of Taxi Driver and drunken self-loathing. In the flesh, this Travis Bickle has a cheerful, matter-of-fact voice that allies itself with the twinkle in his eye. He's a man fit for psychotic episodes. His humour attests to it in every act of passive aggression. When not directed at himself, it yawns in the face of absurdities that surround him. I tell him that he reminds me of Normal Mailer.

'When I started out, I only wanted to write like Mailer,' he tells me in his changing room. He has a habit of saying things he thinks other people want to hear. He knows I write novels so I'm treated to the Richard who should rightfully have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. 'Mailer was a model for how I've lived but my novels are more like something that Saul Bellow would write. Who would publish them? I'm not Jewish enough to be properly recognised as a Jewish novelist.'

I ask him how Jewish he is and how Jewish he wishes he was.

'I'm not at all Jewish,' he confesses. 'Except when I write. Judy compares me favourably with Howard Jacobsen. So does Howard Jacobsen. Howard Jacobsen thinks I'm Jewish.'

It's ingratiating and I'm tempted to ask to see the manuscripts. Does the man have prose as tight as the skin of his forehead? I feel almost transparent beside him; a glyph of anti-health and tobacco rot. Bellow would find it amusing watching this man freely handling his pelt while claiming to be the literary success to Herzog and Augie March. I want to tell him this but Richard's mind is already elsewhere. A parcel has been delivered to the door and he cannot wait to open it.

'Another stuffed heron,' he laughs, perching the cheap doll on the hardwood cliff of his table. 'It's for Bill Oddie. Ever since I mentioned that he's been speared through the thigh by an errant heron, his fans have been sending me these.'

It's clear that fans mean more to Madeley than he admits. To him the recognition is more than cant. Fans are important to the mystique of the man who lets it know that he wears no underpants and never locks the bathroom door. The psychology of the anal retentive is like cheap aftershave and it would be an insult to accuse him of wearing it.

'My fans tend not to come out in daylight,' he laughs. 'I'm not a fashionable wit like Stephen Fry. It's why I'm so often misjudged and people don't like me mentioning my friends in conversation. I don't know what people expect: that celebrities don't live near each other? That men like Stephen wouldn't search me out for a game of Scrabble. Some people find it difficult to believe that Ronnie Corbett lives next door. If I ever wrote that over forty celebrity friends live within a mile of our house, I'd be crucified.'

Crucifixion focuses his eyes and subconsciously he rubs stigmata on his palms. Would it be too easy to say he has a Christ complex? It's the interviewer's prerogative to avoid asking difficult questions when you feel an affinity for a subject. And it's hard not to feel for Madeley. In Manchester, delivering my yearly lecture to young writers, somebody had mentioned the blog that has become a byword for self-destructive journalism. It's called The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society. Humble it is not.

'Writing my blog has allowed me to reach out to people I'd normally cross the street to avoid,' he says. 'A few are a little psychologically unbalanced but I find that's the world. On some days, two hundred people drop by and read about my life. I love them all. Even those that drop by to call me a twat...'

A tear pools in his eye. Pure liquid sympathy. I dare not put it to him that two hundred readers are a piffling number, especially when most of them are there to abuse him. Reading through the names of his regular visitors is like reading out a roll call for a multiple personality disorder. AxmxZ, Selena Dreamy, Elberry, Hope-Athlete, Mutleythedog, Lola, Bertas and The Twitch. I suspect they are all the product of a single mind. When his contract ends, I expect the inevitable breakdown to begin with the cry: 'I am Richard Madeley and I am legend'.

Ruefully, he pops a pink bonbon in his mouth and I hear it crack between white porcelain before he begins to talk of Bill Oddie with great affection. His regard for his celebrity friends marks Richard out as something more than a good guy. He's a patron saint of lost comedians, failed and forgotten actors, and the detritus of showbiz.

The enigmatic hold that Bill Oddie has over Richard's career cannot be fathomed in the time I had with him. All I can do is tell him about the moment my own father introduced me to The Goodies. Kingsley called them 'Britain's response to Baudelaire' but my teenage sympathies lay eastward. There was never any doubt to an impressionable teenager that Bill Oddie was the voice of the anti-establishment and that his comedy was a vehicle for radical liberalism originating behind the Iron Curtain. In his bright red dungarees and lime green vest, he influenced me more than any other artist. I was seduced when still pubescent by guns firing tomato sauce and enormous cats. Later, when on the nadir of my own greatness, Bellow and Updike would efface Oddie from my life. In Madeley, I see a man who chose a different path. Young Amis smiles from his eyes and expresses it better than ever I can.

'Bill's a brainy little gnome,' he says with obvious affection.

I want to tell him that the brainiest little gnome is sitting before me, adjusting the wig on his suntanned brow. In this world of febrile sensibilities, where fashion is as disposable as the cant, Richard Madeley is the last link to homo celebritus. The moment passes too quickly. A knock on the door and I'm introduced to Judy, who doesn't seem to recognise the genius she berates for wearing his fly wide open.

'She's always telling me off about that,' he said, tucking himself away.

'Don't worry,' I reply. 'Norman Mailer always had the same problem. It's what comes of being a great Jewish novelist.'