This morning I got up very early and went off to spend the morning in a cafe in Notting Hill with Damon and Jamie, talking Gorillaz, and the nature of story, and why an imaginary cartoon band can have more integrity than some flesh and blood ones, and all that sort of stuff (all while having our photo taken). Enormously pleasant -- I'd not met Damon before, and hadn't seen Jamie since we went to Berlin for the (first? second?) anniversary of the coming down of the Berlin Wall, about fifteen years ago.
Then I fedexed the tape of the interview off to Wired. I saw Sarah Odedina, my editor at Bloomsbury, for lunch, and talked about the next book I'm writing, which is called The Graveyard Book, and which is for her.
(I had the idea for the book in about 1985, when we lived just over the road from a graveyard, with blocked-off-tunnels beneath the house leading to the graveyard, and the graveyard was also where my two-year-old son used to go to play. And I thought at the time I'd put off writing the book until I was good enough to do it justice. Which, in retrospect, was probably partly silly -- you don't get a better book at different times, just a different book -- but probably in other ways sensible, because the idea of writing The Graveyard Book used to scare me, and now the idea of writing it just makes me inordinately happy.)
After that I saw Colin Greenland and Susanna Clarke (cool bookwrap video interviews with Susanna here) and shortly after that I realised that it was suddenly time not to do anything anymore, and that the whole hot-bath-and-sleep thing seemed peculiarly attractive. And although I suspect I've left lots of things that have happened over the last couple of days out, that's what I'm going to do now.
Goodnight.