Iain Sinclair is speaking to Alan Moore.

‘While researching From Hell, you met Gilbert and George, didn’t you?’

‘That’s right. I’m on first name terms with them.’

***

It’s Friday evening, and I’m at the Bishopsgate Institute, a building people might notice when walking from Liverpool St Station to Spitalfields Market.

The event is a discussion promoting the paperback release of London, City Of Disappearances, a new anthology of musings on the capital. The book is edited by Mr Sinclair and features contributions from Alan Moore and Michael Moorcock, and all three are here to talk about it.

Though I’m by myself, I am delighted to be recognised by one of the event staff: a charming lady who was also the production manager of the Literary Tent at the Latitude Festival.

I look around at the packed seats to see what Sinclair-Moore-Moorcock fans look like. ‘Bookish yet slightly groovy’, is my verdict. All ages. Students in glasses who have barely started shaving, next to white-bearded gentlemen of a certain age. The attractively bookish. Kathy Acker-like ladies with shaven or coloured hair. Martin Amis-like men with silvery partings and donnish postures. People I might know in a parallel universe, or perhaps will later know in this one. Or may have once known, but can’t quite place them. That kind of quasi-recognition.

There’s two additional performers. Brian Catling, who reads his piece referencing 28 Days Later‘s opening scenes on Westminster Bridge. And bookending the proceedings is some striking ululation-style singing by Kirsten Norrie, who uses a microphone and digital delay pedals to fashion a tapestry of layered vocals.

I’ve seen the indelible Alan Moore before; the leonine explosion of hair (tonight tamed in a ponytail), the Old Testament beard, the deadpan Midlands accent, the Rasputin eyes. Moorcock is also bearded, but less wildly so. I’ve seen younger photos of him looking like, well, Alan Moore, and I wonder if that has something to do with his more reigned-in length today. Perhaps you can only have one author looking like that at one time, or the universe will explode.

Moorcock talks about having ‘a good Blitz’, when to wake up in London and find the landscape changed from day to day was exciting rather than frightening. He mentions how it used to be possible to walk from the old Port of London to the West End in no time at all, because the buildings in between were just not there.

Though you have to be careful with Michael Moorcock’s London. He likes to re-imagine whole parts of the city, notably Brookgate, his fictional district based on Holborn. Iain Sinclair interjects that people who’ve read the hardback version of City Of Disappearances have approached him and reminisced vividly about the places Moorcock mentions. Places which never existed.

‘We are living in text,’ points out Moore. ‘We live by manipulating language’. And it’s this line of thinking that really connects with me. I think about the askew glance of the flaneur. Marks on paper becoming bricks and mortar and back again. The language of property deeds: text as possession of the unpossessable. Cities as thought, changed by thought, with text as both the means and the process. Why writing is important, and why it’s important to write.

I think about the time I was in this building before, twenty-five years ago. The event was The Puffin Show, the annual event of games, activities, author signings and storytelling, held by the Puffin Book Club. The Puffin Club was so much more than a mailing list for a children’s publisher; it was a unique labour of love by Puffin boss Kaye Webb and illustrator Jill McDonald. (More here) It also was my own introduction to the joys of writing. (I’ve just found out that the British Library holds a complete run of Puffin Post, the club’s magazine. My heart lifts in anticipation.)

It helps that Moore also likes to entertain as much as provoke thought:

‘London is essentially a fantasy invented by the Midlands.’

His current project is Jerusalem, a book in which he moves away from examining his beloved Northampton as a whole (which he did in Voice Of The Fire) in order to concentrate on a few specific blocks within the town, close to his home. An area, he maintains, which is just as rich in literary material as all of London.

Iain Sinclair talks about ‘the wonderful audience here tonight’. Not the one with me in, but the one in the enormous vintage photograph mounted in the Bishopsgate Institute’s foyer. It’s from a talk in the same room circa 1911, all Edwardian hats and suits and ties, heads turned in every direction, some smiling at the camera, some wary.

[Dear Reader, if you ever find yourself with fifteen minutes to kill while waiting for a train at Liverpool Street, pop over to the other side of Bishopsgate, walk a few paces north to the Institute and take a look at this extraordinary photo. It’s just inside the main door, on the right hand wall.]

Moore reads from ‘Unearthing’, his contribution to the book about his comic-writing friend Steve Moore. He says that since its publication, there have been repercussions in the other Moore’s life. Not least after it was read by a woman appearing in the essay as the unaware object of Steve Moore’s affections. ‘She’s now less unaware.’

The event is a kind of reunion, as Moorcock and Moore appeared together in Sinclair’s 1992 Channel 4 film The Cardinal And The Corpse. It was from the era, Sinclair says, ‘when TV had the old style commissioning process. As opposed to today’s…’ (he thinks of a phrase to describe the current state of television). ‘…today’s elected disenfranchisement. We’re now into a kind of Post-Disappearance Culture.’

Mr Sinclair goes on to read a piece of his own, inspired by a 1950s newspaper story on Jayne Mansfield’s visit to the East End (‘Jayne Mansfield. Actress. Pin Up. Mammal…’), and dedicates the evening to another contributor, the penniless yet prolific Northern poet Bill Griffiths, who died last month.

Moore says he refuses to see the Hollywood version of his graphic novel V For Vendetta. Though Moorcock has seen it in a Texas cinema:

‘I know it’s a world away from the book, but it was fascinating to see your basic ideas – the basic magic – working on rednecks.’

‘Oh well, rednecks,’ replies Moore. ‘That’s always nice.’

***

As I finish this entry, 11.50am on Sunday 28th October, in the news is a blackmail attempt on an unidentified member of the Royal Family, citing ‘sex and drugs’. Which makes me think of Alan Moore’s From Hell.

The other main story is that today marks Royal Mail’s discontinuation of Sunday postbox collections. Another disappearance.