Now here’s a question. Just how does a one-time freight-train guard and rat-catcher, ex-laundry hand, butter-melter, post-boy and nightwatchman, formerly one of Her Majesty’s Immigration Officers, later a station shunter, then a university lecturer, on occasion a brickie’s labourer and, while I think of it, a cocoa-sifter, language tutor, signalman and landscape gardener, not to mention that glorious year when, armed with two buckets and a couple of squeegees, he was the sole proprietor of Clear Day Windows, Inc., of Albuquerque, New Mexico, which business he sold for $1,000 in cash just four hours before he was due to leave town and drive all the way back to Newark New Jersey in a fourteen-year-old Ford station wagon, then turned to freelance journalism, to a short career as a writer of prime-time TV drama, to a BBC hack cranking out 200 documentary scripts in five years, but now pops up as a race-course bookie, everywhere from the cheaps at Pontefract to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and, this winter just ending, as a seasonal drone, and a happy one too, at the sugar-beet factory where he regaled anyone who’d listen with tales about his time as a parcels porter, invoice clerk, electrician’s mate, trainee tree surgeon, and rarely needed to exaggerate to get a laugh…

how indeed, I wonder, how indeed does he wind up in Jack Kerouac’s old apartment, peeing in his toilet, sleeping in his bed, baking bread in his kitchen, sunning himself under the venerable live-oak, all draped with Spanish moss, in the very yard where the supposed King of the Beats slept beneath the southern stars and waited, and waited, and waited for On The Road to be published forty-seven long years ago?

What Road, exactly, did a latter-day drop-out take that led him, at last, after he too had waited, and waited, and waited for some kind of success before slinging his hook and going back to the factory, to this house of literary repute where, having unpacked his two suitcases, he moves from room to room late at night in between eating and writing and flipping through sixty-some tv channels in the vain pursuit of something watchable, all the while averting his eyes from the penetrating gaze of the darkly handsome French Canadian – forever thirty-five, intense and brooding – who stares out at him from two portraits on the walls, from a couple of book covers on the shelf beside the antique Underwood portable, and, from time to time, from within his own over-stimulated imagination?

Does it start on the banks of the Ouse in midwinter? Should I begin with my bike-ride, half-past five on a frosty morning, bending almost double as I lean on the pedals and plough my way through the wind that funnels down the river from the water-meadows north of town? Should I begin by explaining that it was in the brake-van (or caboose if you prefer) of a freight train such as the one now rumbling past me heading north out of York station that I read old Kerouac’s works, hunched over a red-hot cast-iron stove, my book illuminated by a paraffin lamp, as the train rattled its way to Newcastle in the black of mid-December? Should I weave in the homely smell of cocoa, some mornings drifting across from Rowntree’s factory, and the way it always takes me back to the old Extract Block where I whiled away the night-shift trying to write the memoirs of a twenty-seven-year-old – precisely half my lifetime ago? Or should I wait a while before trying to explain why it is that when I look up at the creamy white discharge from the chimneys on Boroughbridge Road billowing across the star-pricked sky, wondering whether it’ll turn a candy pink underbelly – as it did yesterday – to the rising sun, why it is that even faced with an eight-hour shift in the noise and heat and dirt of the sugar-beet processing plant this man who was not so long ago writing for Britain’s number two soap opera, his every episode watched by twelve million viewers, why it is that he finds himself grinning out loud, such is his joy at being back in that reality?

The banks of the river Ouse would indeed be a good place to start.
I can see that. But because I can never hold present circumstance at bay for long, any more than I can keep the past locked away for five minutes, I find myself starting in the here and now. And that means starting with Florida. Worse than that: Orlando. You know: Disney