“How many people are going to be living here?” he asks as we roam through one of the drawing rooms “I don’t know,” I mumble “Two, maybe?” “Let’s have a look upstairs,” he chirps. But, no, the estate agent was happy to imagine I was an eccentric aristocrat slumming it in jeans and a sweatshirt. sk a west London estate agent what

he’s got for sale around the pounds 2m mark,
and, just as long as you can get out those last few words without choking, you’ll be amazed by how quickly he’ll fix you a viewing appointment. I was slightly afraid that I’d have to produce a year’s bank statements before I’d be allowed to peek through the keyhole of a stranger’s pounds 1.8m pied a terre, just down the road from the Albert Hall. The lightweights of the world believe that a football match is nothing more than a Saturday afternoon out and the occasional throaty roar – “C’mon you re-eds!” Any dedicated football fan, of course, knows that the match of the day is just one aspect of an obsessive, lifelong love affair. And she is so outraged, so shocked that I should have dared to break the magic fairy circle round her breast, that in one movement, she rips the teat from the imploring gums, covers up, collects and leaves.Yes!A small step for mankind, but a mighty big one for me.

Mother’s milk, for God’s sake, flowing in a public library!Something snaps inside me In the past, I have leapt a mile from nursing mothers Mustn’t notice, mustn’t go near, mustn’t look Mamma victrix.Not today, sister! Not this time. I set up my machinery; I nudge aside the bag of wipes and nappies deposited where my feet must go; and when it’s time to plug in, I say excuse me, because the one power point in the building is behind her chair. The mothers want me dead, because alive I represent a world that isn’t forever kindergarten.And then, yesterday, I turn up to my little desk and there right next to me is a nursing mother in an armchair, one breast out, and something indeterminate slurping on the end of it. Who else are children’s books written for? For their part the kids would rather be reading Pride and Prejudice.

And for their part the kids don’t give two hoots whether I live or die But their mothers do, oh yes. Make no mistake, maternity is a psychotic condition, somewhere between schizophrenia and acute neurotropic intelligence impairment They want to be their own children In some cases, they believe they are their own children They play with the toys. They ravage the shelves of brightly illustrated books, lisping through one story after another in baby tongue. Yet still my presence goads them half to death.It is partly that they want me to register them and their pretty ones See me, see how well I parent. It is partly that they suspect they should be quiet because I’m working, and then resent me for making them feel guilty.

And it is partly because they don’t want a man here, in any capacity, threatening the safety of their nest. But in the main, it is because they are crazed, out of their minds with mothering. I suffer their pestiferous maternal clatter graciously, in silence I accept that this is their library not mine. I do not say, “Hush!” when they romp rapaciously with their babies. I do not glare when they demonstrate their parental gifts – “Now what have I told you about a library voice?” I do not point out that their children are, in fact, behaving like angels and that the ones who need to remember their library voices are themselves. It doesn’t really have facilities for visiting novelists and their computers.

“We only have one power point,” they told me, “and that’s in the children’s lending section But you are welcome to work there, if you can.”If you can. What they forgot to mention was that the children’s lending section is also the children’s play area Not that I mind the innocent sounds of toddlers at play It’s the mothers who have been giving me a hard time Mothers at play They resent my being here. I sit with my back to them, lost, away in the past, recreating those sweltering days in north Manchester when the hot winds blew in off the Indian Ocean and even the brown snakes had to shelter under the bougainvillea bushes. But then, maybe he never does.This, however, is not a story of thwarted or perverted love Not this week This is a column not a ballad. And in the prosaic way of columns I have to tell you that for several days now I have been sitting in a lovely little tin tornado-proof library in the far north of Western Australia, finishing a novel about table-tennis, set in Manchester in the 1950s.