On the train to Norwich from Liverpool Street.

Some Norwich lads in a corner of this carriage are giggling loudly amongst themselves.

I’ve just put on some headphones in order to enjoy a video file on my laptop (a torrent of The South Bank Show on Will Self, from 1998) and thus drown them out, when one of them comes over and leaves a slip of cigarette-rolling paper on the little fold-down shelf in front of me. It bears a phone number scrawled in luminous green highlighter pen. ‘My friend’s phone number,’ he says, grinning, and points to where he was sitting. Unshaven, podgy, t-shirted, and slightly too old to be a lad, he looks like he could be in the recent films Knocked Up or Superbad.

I guess they’ve had some banter amongst themselves along the lines of, ‘See that blond bloke? He looks gay! You fancy him! I’m going to give him your number. Ha, and indeed, Ha.’

Naively, I had thought my appearance was at minimum risk: no make-up, unusually open-necked shirt (cravat in my bag). But the hair and the white suit are enough.

Oh, they’ve started smoking pot now. On a train carriage. The stench is unmistakable. And now they’re on their phones. ‘Yeah – we’re on the train – we’ve got a ‘roach’!’

The conductor appears, and walks straight past them. Surely he must be able to smell the pot smoke? Maybe he can, and he’s a coward like me. Or maybe it’s just me that’s the weird one. For all my supposed interest in things decadent, I’m prudish about people smoking – smoking anything – on trains. I think on the one hand, ‘Yeah, fight the system, boys!’

But on the other hand I think, ‘You’re prats.’

***

Later. Sarah, the lady who has booked me to DJ tonight, collects me from Norwich station and drives me to the venue in her rather stylish sports car. It’s a restaurant called The Library, and indeed used to be a library. Shelves of books on the walls. Very much my cup of tea. Actually, at this point I’m indeed carrying a plastic cup of tea bought from the station, which I’ve barely drunk and am keen to finish. It’s a decision I regret as we wind around the slopes and cobbles of Norwich in her fast car, but I just about manage to keep the tea from spilling onto my white suit. A lesson learned.

I test the PA set-up, worry a little that one speaker doesn’t work, then Sarah does something that fixes it. She’s treating me to dinner with the other guests.

‘I have a large amount of friends coming who happen to be rugby fans,’ she says. ‘They want to watch the match on the screen before you show your silent movies.’

‘Ah,’ I say, and try to remain calm.

‘It’s okay,’ says Sarah. ‘I’ll sit you next to some people who work for the BBC.’

Still, mustn’t assume anything. Rugby is a curious sport: so brutal, yet with the higher class ‘Gentleman’s Sport’ image of it too.

I always think of the party I once attended which was full of female rugby players. One boyish leather-jacketed lady who played for the team in every sense suddenly grabbed me and snogged me in front of her girlfriend. Like the lads on the Norwich train, it may well have been a joke at my expense. But unkind joke or not, she was handsome in a cool gender-busting way, so I was happy. The smirking lad who approached me on the train was not cool-looking. Well, unless you prefer the guy from Knocked Up over, say, James Franco. Which is exactly what the girl from Knocked Up does, of course, much to my personal disbelief. But oh, I digress, I digress, I digress.

There WAS a cool-looking boy on the train, across from me. Floppy hair, straight out of a Dennis Cooper novel, silently reading To Kill A Mockingbird.

The rugby jokes about ‘trying for a conversion’ have already been made.

My mother went to see Superbad with my Aunt the other day. They loved it.

***
Am typing this in the Norwich hotel before going off to dinner and DJ-ing with the rugby gentlemen. Wish me luck.

This hotel is in Unthank Road. I was singing ‘Unthank my heart…’ as I walked along the street to get here, to the tune of Toni Braxton’s ‘Unbreak My Heart.’