There are things I hate about living in London: the concrete, the dirt, the need to harvest my bodily organs to pay for a coffee.

And most of all I hate A list celebrities who turn the simple job of turning up to work into a media circus. My sister finds it hard to understand why I don’t get excited seeing Orlando Bloom. I don’t get excited because I see him every day, at around 6pm he pulls up on St Martins Lane and gets out to a crowd of adoring In My Way When I’m Trying To Get Home tourists.

It annoys me. It vexs me. The fact that most of the onlookers are nubile women has nothing to do with it. Oh no.

On to things I like about London: authors come here.

I have, with an uncharacteristic display of organisation, secured tickets to that rarest of things – a Susanna Clarke event. The event, being held by Blackwells at the Bloomsbury Theatre, is being chaired by Neil Gaiman on 25th September. Tickets can be found here.

If you don’t know who Susanna Clarke is – where were you during 2004? – she wrote the excellent novel “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell”, the event is promoting her short story collection “The Ladies of Grace Adieu”. She is quite simply one of the most original voices in fantasy today.

I will of course be camped out way ahead of time, camera in hand, stopping some other poor bugger from getting home from work…

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