hanging on

I was drinking with Francis in the Pillars of Hercules, as an act of piety to all the underpaid writers who drank there long before us. He’s writing a book about technology, and I had just come from wrapping my radio programme about the Church of England. It had brought back a suppressed memory of the time I decided I would never write another religious news story: I had typed on my laptop in some railway waiting room — there was no time to get to London — the words “the Church of England” and promptly fell asleep for some minutes. “Ah, yes”, he said, “in the mobile phone chapter I walk a slack rope of interest across the bottomless pit of boredom; sometimes I fall off.”